Requirements for Progress Checks

INTRODUCTION

Progress checks will account for a significant portion of your overall grade in this course. Submitted biweekly (every two weeks), progress checks are intended to serve as a regular opportunity to document and reflect on your art-making process. While you might not be accustomed to assessing your art-making in a metacognitive way, this process has great potential to help you develop a sense of self-awareness, which in turn allows you to identify and target pitfalls in the ways that you think about and create art, regardless of the materials and methods you use.

Additionally, the process of documentation and reflection in a timely manner is essential for high performance in the College Board assessment of your portfolio(s). Providing detailed progress checks on a regular basis will facilitate the process of synthesizing what you have learned when you complete the written portions of the College Board assessment, and in turn increase your chances of receiving a high AP score.

These materials should be submitted in Canvas every two weeks. You should compile all of your materials in your Google Slides presentation that you update every two weeks with your new Progress Check.

Keep track of what you accomplish each day. 

In your written statement, give a brief summary of what you have accomplished in AP Studio Art in the last two weeks, including any work you may have completed outside of class. This report can include investigative and exploratory work (such as sketchbook work and research) as well as instances of actual art-making. Your response should be clear and detailed enough that the thought process and intention of your actions should be explicit. For example, instead of saying “I spent Tuesday and Thursday painting my piece,” your answer might include things like "I focused on narrowing down color choices", "I chose to explore acrylic and stucco materials". Finally, provide an estimate of your progress on a project (i.e. how close are you to being done) and indicate what is likely to happen next.

Your answer can be a bullet-pointed list or paragraph form, and might be structured as follows:

• Investigation and Exploration:

• Art-Making and Extended Projects:

• Estimated Progress on Project:

• Future Directions:

For this section you should include at least ONE image accompanied with a written description that explains the materials, processes, AND ideas used in the two week period.

• Materials refer to the items being used to create your work, including media (e.g. acrylic paint, colored pencil) as well as any specialized equipment (e.g. a Wacom tablet, flat brush, V-gouge) involved in its creation

• Processes refer to the techniques and/or 'steps' involved in creating your work. This could describe the specific technique used within a medium (for example, cross-hatching with pencil or the wet-on-wet technique with watercolor), or a stage of your art-making (such as thumbnail sketches and color keys)

• Ideas should draw a clear connection between the work and your Sustained Investigation. You can discuss things like imagery (i.e. "the use of a chaotic background creates a sense of unease"), color choices (i.e. "the use of pastels references innocence and softness"), narratives (i.e. "in this work is in a cramped, contorted position to convey a sense of anxiety"), or any other major concept.

Be sure to be as specific and thorough as possible: if you are painting, for example, do not just say "I painted this section red". Reference the specific type of paint used, the kind of brush used to render the area, why you're using red in the first place, etc. Even if something didn't end up working, make a note of it and speculate on how you can avoid a similar mistake or pitfall in the future.

For this section, you should include at least ONE image accompanied with a written description that elaborates on a form of practice, experimentation, or revision that you engaged in during the two week period. It is very likely that you will need to submit more than one image for this section to communicate these concepts.

• Practice might include items like pertinent studies, warm-up sketches, or quick renderings to test the chosen media. These are elements that lead up to creation of the final work, but are not necessarily a part of the work itself.

• Experimentation is linked to practice in that it does not necessarily have to happen on the final product: it can entail testing out different compositions or color schemes in thumbnail sketches, using an unusual combination of techniques, or any other series of actions you've done to 'test' something out

• Revision entails making modifications or adjustments to your work, and oftentimes occurs as a result of experimentation and critique. Revision involves making a change that deviates from the original vision of the piece: in this section, you should describe the initial and the final state of the element you've chosen to revise.