The development of this piece began with Alden's desire to depict "an attitude." He was looking through magazine photographs when he was struck by an image of a little boy, "who had a real attitude." Alden decided to try to convey a similar attitude, but in a way that would stretch the idea even further.

To do that, he used a grid to transform the image. The boy's gesture and pose in the photo already exhibited a degree of twisting. Alden decided to build on that, by twisting the entire image. Although he had seen work by others in which a grid was used to enlarge or reduce an image, he had neither used a grid himself nor seen a work in which a grid was used to produce the kind of distortion he was after. Therefore, he had to figure out how to use the grid to make the final product circular. "It was easy," he says, "once I figured it out."

Because Alden attended an arts high school, AP Studio Art was a required course -- one of three studio classes he took during his senior year. One of his strong interests is in illustration, and the concentration project that he developed for his AP portfolio involved illustrating a myth that he had made up earlier in the year as a writing assignment for his AP English Literature class.

Currently, Alden is a student at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, where his interest in illustration continues unabated. Alden reports that Ringling has particularly fine facilities and instruction in cutting-edge computer animation, and that he is looking forward to working intensively with computers during his junior and senior years. For now, he is concentrating on getting a good artistic base for the computer work. His hope is that, as technology evolves, he will be able to combine the advantages that computer animation offers with his love of illustration and the pleasure of working directly on paper.