Over the past two years I have learned a lot about my artistic ability. Before coming into this class I had only taken the required art class where we would make holiday artwork and spin art. I never challenged myself with my work in the artistic area. Once I joined art in high school, I was able to start exploring my artistic abilities. I do understand the artistic behaviors and I feel like I used almost all of them every month when was creating pieces. The hardest one to use is raise global awareness for a specific piece of work. For every month I definitely collaborated and reflected with friends to get some extra feedback or to bounce ideas off them for my pieces. I also take many risks in my artwork but from that I end up having to solve a lot problems. I think that I take risks everyday with my artwork because my artistic abilities were not that advanced, I feel that with a lot of my different pieces I was trying something new and trying stuff that I didn’t actually know how to do very well. But with that comes mistakes and problems and I was able to solve these problems from risk taking. I was fortunate enough to sit with two of my friends who had both taken art since sophomore year and one of them was in AP this year. I think that sitting with these two girls has helped me so much because I was able to observe some of their artwork and how they make certain things and I was able to implement them into my work.
My favorite piece that I did this year was my drawing of the girl in pencil. It reminds me a vogue sketch and I love how it came out with the contour in pencil and all of the shading looks so goods and gives it so much dimension. I love this piece because I worked so hard on this piece and I really wanted to make it good. I grew up around my grandmother’s wedding dress sketches and I loved how cool all the sketches looked because they had a vogue feel to them. The faces have very fine jawlines and their faces are perfectly shaped and it gives the look a very subtle but classy feel. I never thought I could make a sketch like this because I thought it would be challenging but once I finished it I was so happy with how it came out. Later on in the year we did a portrait unit and I was able to make this piece again but with a cool background and with black paint rather than pencil. My most successful unit was portrait drawing. This unit I was able to watch videos on how to draw different facial features and create drawings of an eye, a mouth and a nose. These came out really good and much better than I would have every expected. I worked really hard on them one night and focused really hard on all of the little details and the shading. This year I definitely grew the most in this unit. I think that this course was a very fun course for my junior and senior year and acted as a stress reliever for me and gave me a break from all of my other school work. I enjoyed critic days because I was able to get really good ideas from my classmates and get positive feedback on my work even if I thought it was bad. Something that I would have changed about this class would be having 4 photos in every months blog post. I think that progress photos are a good idea but it’s very hard to remember when you are very focused on completing a piece. Maybe next year one day a week you could take 5 minutes at the end of a class to take a progress photo and do a quick table critique so that everyone gets their photos and has a quick critique so that they can implement those ideas into next week's continued work. I loved this class and I’m very sad that I continue this in college with my teacher their to guide me!
1 Comment
This month I worked on finishing a piece that I was working on previously. Ended up not liking it and just kind of stopped. I think I needed some time away from it because I worked so hard on the gradient and just got a tired of the idea. I had finished the swing and the gradient and lastly I just needed to add little details but I think I will revisit this painting over the summer and try to get a perspective on the summer flowers and try to look at the nature rather than on the internet. I had to solve problems with this piece. I was struggling to get a good gradient and I was unsure of how to make it better. I started to mix a lot of white in the areas that I was blending the green and blue since those colors are very distinct colors and are hard to blend. I started another piece of artwork this month. I took a small square canvas and I wanted to create a small painting of a seahorse. I looked at a picture of the seahorse so I could draw it right. Then I made it my own piece of work by adding a background with green plants and a coral theme. This piece is not finished yet but I plan to finish it and focus on all the details with seahorse. I took a risk with this piece because the colors don’t blend that easy on a wooden canzas. I had to keep adding black to different shades of blues to try to blend that deep colors. This month has been a good month of work and I’m excited to have a piece that I can work on/ finish over the summer!
This month I started a new piece. I am painting a picture with a gradient background of green to blue to white. This was hard because the blue and green are very different colors that are very hard to blend into a gradient. I needed to use a lot of light colors and I had to be able to blend them with a lot of white. I had to use the artistic behavior with problem solving because when the gradient didn’t look the way I wanted it to look, I had to work through the problem and come up with a solution. My solution was the color white because it always help blend colors that are both so distinct. Another artistic behavior that I used was I observed my peers art work too. I watched as one of my friends was blending different shades of brown together and I watched as she blended to get a try a better technique of blending. I hope that my piece will be done by the end of the month. I think that creating the swing will be challenging but I am always up for a challenge. I also made my poster for my senior project that was a little change from painting.
This month we started to make portraits. I taught myself how draw some facial features from drawing videos and learned a lot about shading certain areas on facial features which helps create more lifelike facial features. I developed a skill with my shading and I was able to make my sketches look more real to show a lot of depth. I was very impressed with myself and the drawings that I made because I have never been a very great drawer but I really expanded my horizons in art making. I had made a sketch earlier in the year and I was able to make a cool background on a canvas and redraw it on top on that. I was unsure if it was going to work and my class did a critique day and I was able to get feedback. People commented on how they liked the background and that it was a cool idea so I went through with it and I really ended up liking it.
This month I started two new pieces. I started a very colorful painting that I really liked. I was not sure in the beginning if I wanted to use colors that matched or just random colors. I think that using both warm and cool colors make the painting pop and the colors don't hide. I had to collaborate with my peers at my table to help me make some colors that can really pop. I also raised my global awareness of artmaking with making a boundry piece. I had to think of something that was a boundry and I thought of a town sign because it is the boundry between two signs and it separates it. I really enjoyed making these pieces because they turned out to be everything I wanted it to be. This month I really explored my horizon of artmaking and I am really happy with how it turned out. I will start the next month with finishing my first piece.
This month I worked on a holiday painting. I developed a skill while making this piece. I had to blend different colors of browns together to give the face some depth. This took me many classes to figure out how to get it perfect. I needed to find the perfect tones that would help create the shade effect of the face. For this month we did a big class reflection on each others paintings. I really enjoy doing these because I get to give positive feedback on other peoples art and make them happy and also get to give suggestions incase they need a little extra help. We went around and commented on others works of art and then received our own comments and got to use the feedback while completing our work. Many people commented on my shading in the face and said that it was done well which made me really happy because that was what I worked so hard on. I started a piece that I hope will come out really cool with a combination of a warm and cool color palette.
This month we really focused on making all original art. We were given a lot of freedom to do what we would like and make any pieces of original work that we liked to. What I did this month was I made a painting for my grandmother with a pink gradient because she had breast cancer and she bleeds pink now. The painting had a tree on it representing the growth that she had throughout her whole experience with breast cancer and how she grew stronger over time. I added some circles just as little details to make it pop but I tried to use very simple colors to make the bright background pop. I love the way that the gradient in the background came out and all the details. Along with creating original art I had to collaborate a lot with my friends around me. I would get an idea but always ask them first what they thought about it so that I knew it was actually a good idea and I wasn’t just thinking it was a good idea. I really enjoyed making my own art and working with the people around me to create my best work.
During the second month of art, we did 2 things that were assigned and then I started my own piece of art. First we had to make a drawing on a paper bag after it was wet and ironed. I took a chance and a risk when I drew on a surface that wasn’t flat. The things that I drew were glass pieces and that was challenging but I think I really got good highlights in the pictures. After that we did some blind contours and we worked on drawing different things around the room and people without looking down at the paper. The drawings don’t really come out looking anything like what we were drawing but over time you become better as you go slower and have plenty of practice. Then we did a contour drawing of ourselves. I really struggled with this and didn’t end up liking it at all. I had to collaborate with others around me to get some help from others. It was very challenging to use the different charcoals. Last thing that I am working on is a painting on a canvas. I am making something that has warm colors on the top for the sun. Then there are cool colors on the bottom for the water. The colors are opposites and they make each other pop. I really enjoy doing projects that I can come up with on my own.
During our first month of art this year we accomplished a few projects that have really shown a lot of the artistic behaviors. In the beginning of the year, the first thing we had to do was make a data selfie of ourselves. We used a guideline that we were given and showed different things about us like our age, time we go to bed, and so much more. Then we made a class hive! We each had to make our own hive of seven different drawings about ourselves. I made little drawings that described different aspects of my life. I felt that I communicated through my work because I was showing things about me that I like and that I’m passionate about. Lastly for this month we made a still-life drawing and focused on the negative space. I drew different objects in the room and kept them with black lines with line variation, then I painted the negative space with pastels colors to really make them pop out. I had to collaborate with others when deciding what colors I was going to use. My group helped me feel confident in the colors I was using and I felt that I made a piece of art that I was most confident in.
Wayne Thiebaud was an artist who loved drawing cupcakes, cakes, gum ball machines and so much more. We got to make sweets of our choosing then use oil pastels, we blended the colors to get the perfect shadows. This project was rally fun and we got to make whatever kind of foods we wanted to.
|
AuthorRiley Archives
September 2018
Categories |