Advanced Studio Art

Semester 1 Reflection

This semester I feel like I have been most successful with making pieces that feel complete. By this I mean I have used a lot of color and included good backgrounds. I have also improved with materials that I'm not used to like colored pencil and gouache and played with breaking borders and different perspectives.

My inquiry question is: how do humans interact with nature? Focusing on just this one question for multiple projects has challenged me to come up with a series of unique ideas with the same basic subject matter. It has been helpful when thinking of ideas because it sort of narrows down the number of things that I could draw and makes it easier to choose a design. When we did the scholastics #1 and #2 I had a lot of difficulty deciding what the subjects should be because there wasn't any specific prompt to base it off of.

My artistic goals for the second semester are to try using paint more and to improve with colored pencils. I also want to find a way to make my sustained investigation more specific. I would do this by choosing to show either the negative or the positive ways that humans interact with nature instead of just doing a bunch of drawings that include both humans and nature. So if I chose the positive, then I would show specific ways that nature positively impacts humans and ways that humans positively impact nature.

Final Reflection

In this class I have learned to be more consistent with the themes and ideas behind my art by following my sustained investigation. I started out with a less specific question (how do humans interact with nature?) which made it difficult to come up with ideas and create pieces that connected to each other. I ended up making this question more specific while still keeping the basic elements of humans and nature as subjects in my arts. The new question was how can I illustrate phrases inspired by nature using space? This allowed me to choose from a list of phrases I collected as a starting point when thinking of each idea and then explore different perspectives and compositions. I also improved my process when thinking of ideas for a drawing by sketching a lot of thumbnails and design options in the sketchbook I got at the beginning of the year for this class. Using different perspectives when drawing people helped me make pieces that were more unique than just portraits and I was able to improve my figure drawing skills. I occasionally struggled with coming up with a new idea for each piece as I ran out of phrases that inspired me. Because it took me so long to come up with an idea and because I was busy with other school work, I often found myself staying up very late to finish projects before they were due. Time management is something that I need to work on when it comes to art projects because I like to spend a long time on them to make sure they turn out just right. My artistic goals for the summer are to paint more and to create more finished pieces outside of art class instead of just drawing in sketchbooks.