(June 16, 2006) — A green, goateed alien with a huge Hawaiian shirt, brown shorts and red chucks: the newest addition to Disney’s Lilo & Stitch ? Well, not really. This comical character is actually the creation of senior Serozh Sarkisyan’s imagination—the main character in a two-minute-forty-second clip that he presented as the final product for his senior project. Sarkisyan decided to explore the field of 3D modeling and animation, since he is planning to major in game design at the Art Institute of California, Los Angeles. The project was his first attempt at animating his own character. Through online tutorials and animation forums and with tips from his mentor Tom Martin, Sarkisyan was able to develop his own storyboard, model and texture his alien and create a virtual scene for the story using 3D Studio Max. However, the working process wasn’t all fun and games for this young artist. “I got very little sleep the last week before the senior project was due. I put in at least six to eight hours every day just working on it,” Sarkisyan said. Besides Sarkisyan, several other seniors decided to explore the arts for their senior project. Senior Iren Tatevosyan, for example, concentrated on caricatures. She decided working with portraits would be a fun and exciting diversion from her usual landscape painting and enrolled back into her drawing classes, which she initially had to quit due to an already hectic schedule. Although Tatevosyan’s first pieces took her as long as an hour to complete, her final product consisted of three caricatures that were drawn from seven to ten minutes. To train herself to draw more quickly, she observed professional caricaturists at work, copied online caricatures of celebrities and practiced drawing on her own. According to Tatevosyan, the most memorable part of this experience was seeing the reaction on her friend’s faces when she showed them their caricatures. “It was just funny how they would point to things and laugh at each other.” Senior Sue Cano also chose to develop her creativity by focusing on photography—specifically on a technique she learned from teacher William Saul’s photography class called “Painting with Light.” Cano said that she had to make sure the room used was completely dark so she could “paint” light with a flashlight onto her subject. “The experience was rewarding because it gave me a chance to improve on my photography skills and consider it as a possible side-career in the future,” Cano said.