AP-2D art students have started work on their portfolios by creating mind maps to help wrap their heads around a central idea for their Sustained Investigation, or a series of 15 pieces that reflect an inquiry over time.  

“I found creating a mind map super helpful for planning out the theme for my projects because it allowed me to really unpack a bunch of different ideas at once,” senior Molly Beckette said. “One idea would lead me to another and it just started this chain reaction of creativity that was so easy to take off and run with.” 

And according to Beckette, the process doesn’t have to be pretty, in fact, it’s been messy. 

“It’s the theme I’m going to have to stick with all year, so I wanted to avoid picking something I’d burn out on,” she said. “I didn’t really have a solidified idea to start off with, so I just started listing things I was interested in until I found something that I could work with. It was really just a lot of narrowing down ideas until you found the perfect one that clicked.” 

Senior Emma Varela can relate to Beckette, as she believes tidiness doesn’t really matter when it comes to a project focused on brainstorming. 

“I just started with the center title and every time I would come up with an idea, I would add a branch or extend the branches that were already there,” Varela said. “To be honest, it’s kind of messy and has a lot of images and probably hard to understand, but it works for me.” 

Varela is looking to study the concept of feminine masculinity for her investigattion, and putting all her ideas on paper helped to better plan out the projects she hopes to create. 

“Mind mapping helped me see if I had enough projects to actually fill my whole portfolio before I actually did it because if I had started but then couldn’t come up with anything else, that would’ve been really bad,” she said. “I could see what I wanted to do with each project. I came up with a whole list of ideas, some concentrating on color, some on movement.”