Thursday, October 31, 2013

Trash Wave
 

While I was walking around my neighborhood picking up trash I realized that trash can be found literally everywhere. For my project I decided to do a wave of trash to represent all the trash that goes into the ocean. Even though people may not leave that much trash at the beach, that is where it is all going to end up. Nobody wants to swim in a filthy ocean, and sea animals should not be eating things that can be toxic to them. All this trash is harmful to us and the animals in the ocean. People need to be more aware of this problem and start throwing away their trash or recycling to help make a difference for our environment.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013


Trashy Earth
            I decided to base my “trash” art to the setting of the Disney movie Wall-E. When I first saw that movie I told myself that the earth will never be so filled with trash that we would have to move out to space in order to survive. After seeing all the trash that comes from the city surfacing in the beach, I realized that if we keep this up, our earth will become just one huge landfill, filled with no life. With so many overwhelming amount of plastic, toxins, cigarette butts, etc. I was able to make my “trashy earth”. It frightens me how much awful stuff gets left on the beach, slowly killing us and all wildlife. I am trying to prove though my art that we need to stop polluting and start cleansing. A cleaner earth means a better life, for the present and for the future. Nobody wants to live with trash and neither does Mother Earth.

Vanessa Mena
October 22, 2013
English 101
Professor Lollie Ragana

Monday, October 28, 2013

Environment Helper

Hong Tang
Professor Ragana
ENGL 101
October 23, 2013
Environment Helper

            Due to the environment issues, there will be a good timing for us to reduce our damage to the global. Today, the most serious environment issue is the global warming. Human activities are altering the composition of the atmosphere which causes the Earth’s temperature change. The most serious problem is the carbon emission. The activity that caused the most carbon emission was driving motor vehicle. Therefore, if we want to save our global, then we should try to take public transportation, bike or walk instead of driving a car to protect our environment. I would recommend ride a bike as transportation because the use of bicycle has virtually no carbon footprint, and you get healthy exercise from bicycling which will providing you better muscle tone and bone mass improvement. Also, regular bicycling will help with personal weight management.
 

A Sea of Cigarettes


Jennifer Menjivar
Professor Ragana
English 101
23 October 2013
                                                                        A Sea of Cigarettes
            My art project is based on the cigarettes I found on the beach. After the beach trip, all I see now when I look out into the ocean is cigarettes. My project expresses the way I see the ocean now because the fish and seaweed was mostly made of cigarettes. The eye and bubbles are made out of the bottle caps I found hidden in the sand. With every piece I picked up, I thought of the damage it was doing to the environment and how ignorant people can be with their stick of cancer.  It is disturbing to think that every cigarette I found was close to a trash can on the beach.  I personally don’t like cigarettes, but after this project; I can now say I truly hate them.   



Saturday, October 26, 2013

Mr.Puffin


For my art project, I decided to use the trash to make a figure of a Puffin. The Puffin has a belly full of trash to show people the dangers of not properly disposing their trash. Due to the fact that trash is overflowing to oceans, puffins can accidentally eat it. The trash is extremely danger to them. If a puffin eats too much of the trash, he will not be able to digest it and will die of starvation.  For the body of the Puffin, I used a plastic food container and filled it with trash. His head is made out of a take-out styrofoam cup and his beak is made out of a cup cover. His feet are made out of straws, while his wings are made out of a plastic cup cover.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Smoked Fish

I chose to collect cigarette butts, a cigarette box, beads, a metal bottle cap, and a foam disposable plate to create my project. The fish is made up of cigarette butts and other unnecessary things that end up in our ocean because people do not simply dispose of it in a trash can and an ash pit. I believe that if a person is going to smoke, they should be responsible of disposing their used cigarette in an ash pit. I also noticed that there are not that many ash pits as there are trash cans in the beach and even in cities. You cannot force people to stop smoking. Therefore, we should make it easier for them to dispose of their cigarettes. Putting ash pits next to trash cans would be beneficial to our oceans and to the cleanliness of our cities. The cigarettes people smoke and throw on the floor are washed out into the ocean and cause pollution from all the chemicals in them. Fish and even birds may mistake the cigarettes or small parts of it for food and eat them. Then, we catch the fish, cook them, and feed them to our families. Imagine all the chemicals we are consuming by eating the fish: chemicals from the cigarettes and chemicals from other pollutants that end up in our ocean.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

20/20 Geen Vision

Christian Bedoyan
English 101- Professor Ragana
October 21, 2013
                        20/20 Green Vision
I made two different binoculars with 4 bottles found around Washington Park. They are accompanied by a string to attach to an individual's neck. The first binoculars is made of plastic water bottles with no openings on the opposite side. This represents of how I had a blurred vision of the world by using plastics. The second binoculars is made of two green 7-Up Cans. These cans have openings on the opposite side to represent the power of going green and seeing the world clearly through reusing, reducing, and recycling. The cans are recyclable as well which adds to the factor of taking care of our environment. Since plastic is forever, it alters our vision but through recycling and living green our eyes will be opened to the world just as my vision was changed through going green.

Blooming Trash



Alejandra Rodriguez
English 101
prof. Ragana, Lollie

The concept of my project was to take something ugly and destructive, like trash that was contributing to the pollution in our beaches and create art. I made a bouquet of soda can flowers in a vase. The flowers I made from cutting and folding soda cans and are held together by tape. The stems of the flowers are made on cotton swabs and held in the vase by Styrofoam and tape as well. The vase is my favorite part of my piece. The bottom half of the vase is made of a soda bottle cap, from a soda that I drank. The top half is made of a broken light bulb from when I accidently dropped my lamp. I used tape to cover all cracks and sharp edges of the bulb. I glued the bulb upside down to the bottle cap to give it its vase shape. Finally I covers the entire thing in white out so that the texture of the “vase” would allow me to draw on it. The concept of my art piece is that you can take something ugly such as trash on earth and you can reduce, reuse, and recycle it to make something beautiful. This explains why I have the can flowers blooming from the earth.

Back to the Future! ... Wait What Future?



David Sandoval
English 101
Pro. Ragana
Back to the Future!.... Wait What Future?
In the process of creating this car I realized many things about our future. I realized that if we keep living the way we are there won't be a future. The amount of trash I collected just by walking down the street astonished me. I could not believe that people will litter even though there is a trash can a couple of feet away. Everyday the amount of trash in the environment keeps increasing rapidly. If we do not change our bad habits we will just become a giant wasteland. The car I have created out of trash represents us speed racing to the end of the world. If we keep polluting our environment there will be no future to travel to. Lets keep our environment clean so that way we can have a promising future.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013



Trash In A Jar

This is a collection of trash found in the beach and my front yard. Which wasn't really hard to collect because there's three little girls under the age of 10 so trash is everywhere. While at the beach it didn't look like there was a lot of trash but those little pieces accumulate and turn into mountains of garbage. So its better to properly dispose of our trash and recycle!

Name: Michelle Sosa 
Class: ENG 101-34
Teacher: Ragana 

The Sad Palm Tree

My Name is Diana Reyes, for my art project I decided to do a palm tree next to a small ocean. The reason being is that as time passes global warming gets bigger and bigger, which causes all the animals that live in the ocean to slowly disappear. The palm tree is made out of the cardboard which represents the trunk slowly falling to the side because the ocean is slowly becoming dry, this is talking about from few years from now is global warming keeps  on being so big as if its now. The plastic represents the leafs from the tree. If we go somewhere we are most likely to see plastics than actual leafs, this affects the ocean and its animals getting contaminated. The whole Idea of my art project is the we have to recycle our bags reuse them lets not let them stay in our ocean and make it look like those are the things trees carry. Also little by little  the oceans will become dry because of how our population is growing and how much evaporation now a days carry so much water. Even though I didn't help clean the beach I did clean building 3 dorms at CSULA and it made me realize how much our own residents don't  take care of our side and take time to throw away their trash or if it falls from the trash cans they don't take the time to put it back in. The little things that we do can help global warming. Spread the word Recycle take care of your own world.

English 95-Mrs.Hicks

Deadly Fish

Stephany Martinez
Ragana Lollie
English 101 MW

I decided to make a fish for my trash art project. The fish's body is made out of a
soda bottle. The fins and tale are made out of cardboard. The eyes are made out of
bottle lids. Inside the fish I put many types of trash I found at home and at the beach
cleanup. I put inside, forks, spoons, necklaces, batteries, a lighter, marker taps, and plastic
bags. I put a smiley face on the fish symbolizing its innocence while eating the trash. Another
thing I put on the fish was a heart so we can touch our hearts and not throw trash in the floor.
My message is that not to throw trash in the floor because it affects both the fish and us humans
because we eat the fish and the fish has trash that we are not aware of. So therefore think twice
about throwing trash in the floor because it can come back to you.

Don't be Bitter, Pick up Litter


Stephanie Hernandez
English 101
Don’t be Bitter, Pick up Litter

            After participating in Heal the Bay clean-up at Dockweiler Beach, I was amazed to see that most of the trash that I picked up had to do with food. I ended up finding tons of candy wrappers, plastic bottles, plastic straws, plastic bottle caps, paper plates, disposable paper cups and much more. I was also shocked to discover a whole uneaten apple and an unopened juice pouch on the ground. This disturbed me, not only because it was effecting our environment, but also because I think about the people out there do not get to eat an apple or drink juice. There are people out there in this world that go to bed hungry and here we are at the beach and I find these small, yet significant resources completely wasted. It makes me question how selfish some people can be. Because of all this, I decided to illustrate this with my art project. Now I am not an artist, however my project represent a “serving” of the beach, with an empty can of iced tea, an Oreos wrapper, a whole apple, a full juice pouch, a water bottle, plastic bottle caps, and paper plate, all of which was found on the beach. I want people to get a “taste” of the beach with this as example. 

We Are The Environment We Live In .

For my art project I decided to create a man made from the various objects I collected at the beach. It goes along with what my title says, We are the Environment We Live In which means that we are somewhat becoming trash as we are making our planet trash too. We have to first take care of our planet for it to be healthy so we can be healthy too. Our oceans are becoming polluted and the sea creatures are eating what is contaminating the ocean. We are eating fish that have been infected by different types of poisoned substances floating and mixing with the ocean water and not even noticing we are. Not only are our oceans being contaminated but our water supply, the air we breathe, and the food we eat. It is up to us to announce to the world how our natural environment is diminishing and how we have the power to improve it. We are the ones who will suffer the consequences if we don’t take care of our planet.

The Tar Monster!



Andrew Fausto
22 October 2013
Professor Ragana
English 101
The Tar Monster
This lovely piece of art was created solely from trash and tar collected from the Dockweiler Beach. As I picked up the tar along the coastline the first thing that came to my mind was a giant, oozing, evil tar monster and that is exactly what I have created. Some surfers have told stories where they have been surrounded in tar while swimming in the ocean. Some say that it is caused by oil drilling in the local areas. Regardless whether this is true or nobody likes having his or her beach day ruined by having tar on them.  Let us not forget about the wildlife that has to swim in these tar-infested waters surrounded by trash as well. Let us all do our part and keep our local beaches clean.

Happy Days


Michael Gaitan
Professor Ragana
English 101
23 October 2013
Happy Days
            While I was at the beach cleaning up I saw dolphins swimming and jumping with joy and I thought that maybe they are happy because we are cleaning up their home. My project consists of waves that are colored in blue with the plastic wrapping of water bottles, which symbolizes the plastic free water the dolphins are swimming in. My sun is a plastic bottle cap that I took of a soda bottle I found and the clouds are made up of dryer sheets, which I have no idea how they got to the beach, but they were there. The beach is still however not fully clean but if we all stop littering then it gives us hope that there will be more happy days.