With this assignment I made an abstract ceramic of my dog. I first got my clay and made the flat background first. When initially started making the background I did it with  gloves on but soon realized the gloves weren't going to give me that nice smooth finish I wanted and had to begun molding it with my bare hands. Once the background was to me liking I started on the dog, making his rectangular body and his ears were the most enjoyable part of the assignment. Finally, the creation of my ceramic was done and ready to be fired. With being fired there is some chemistry within that, the heat from the kilin activates the atoms in the clay and results in a chemical reaction which then makes the clay hard. After we take out our new hardened ceramic we can do our last step to glaze your ceramic and finally out it back in the kilin to dry the glaze!

In this assignment, we anonymously picked elements of the periodic table to do a representation of. In my art I picked Beryllium and I wanted to show a representation of it in atom form. I did this by having my colors go from a soft grey to a dark grey/black because the atom Beryllium has a natural dark/grey color so I chose that color to be the main color palette.

The actual creation of my art, I did it in an app called Photopea. Once inside the app, I used the color palette and gradient to achieve the colors but what became difficult was blending and smoothing out the darker colors at the top with the lighter color. Overall though, it was fun and I would make sure for my next piece I put more time into blending my colors.

For the second quarter, the entire grade level worked on a project called Deeply Rooted which explored how symbols can express both cultural differences and similarities. We looked at how symbols are used throughout the world and developed our own, more contemporary symbols. We made homemade paper in art class and symbols out of crystals of borax. I decided to create a cross because it represents Christianity. It was challenging to bend the paper; next time, I'd like to make it bigger and perhaps increase the color contrast to make it stand out in the PBL. Our art was displayed with performances from other cultures on the day of the showcase.

The image above is the art piece I created to represent specific elements of the principles of design. Some of the principles of design incorporated in my art are proportion and proximity. Proportion concerns the relationship between the sizes of different parts in an artwork. Shown in my art through the different sizes of the circles I have on the paper this is proportion. Proximity states that items close together are likely to be perceived as part of the same group. Shown in my art through the closeness with the circles on the paper this is proximity. 

This was the final unit presentation of our charcoal unit.