Final Reflection on this Semester

2D Design has been engaging, encouraging, and also very stressful for me. I have always had a close relationship with art, I always find myself coming back to doodling, or painting, or creating comics no matter what. However, I never really think about art beyond the technical skills of it: how can I make this look better? What techniques do I need to improve? In the beginning of the class, I was very comfortable with the projects we were given. Getting to practice pattern on my spider painting for the Circle assignment, or replicating the tiny veins and blemishes of a leaf, turning a paint splatter into a cat. All of these things I found comfortable because I wasn’t emotionally engaged with them. Then, we came to the Emotional Design, where we created an image with a pattern that displayed a certain emotion. I had no idea what to do, which is evident in my—admittedly very symmetrical and intricate piece—that doesn’t clearly show any emotion (or maybe it was displaying as much apathy as I was). The next time I was challenged was with the Stars and Stripes project and the following Political Response project. This time I had too much emotional investment in the projects. I grew up in a politically involved family, and I am now a politically/socially involved person. There were so many issues that I wanted to focus on, and I wasted a lot of precious in-class time trying to figure out what I wanted to do. With the due-dates closing in, I focused on current events for both of them. The next two projects were the most challenging, but they show my improvement the best when it comes to bringing meaningful thought into my art that can pair with my comfort zone of focusing on technique. The inclusion design is the first. I was interested in doing a painting with a renaissance painting with one of those halos around the subject’s head. The project was based around what inclusion looks like and more specifically the inclusion of disabled people, and I decided that it would be interesting to portray a woman with a disability in a position where historically she would have been excluded. The next was where we had to create a poster or image encouraging Mainers to become organ donors. I very specifically chose an emotional subject for this assignment, a mother and her child. These final projects, though I stumbled a bit, helped me come to my current conclusion: I can have meaningful, sentimental artwork that has more to it than me thinking it looks nice, but I also don’t have to put my own personal emotions into it. Art doesn’t have to reflect everything I’m feeling, which is why I feel apprehensive to more emotionally invested artwork.

Enough sentimental rambling. My technical skill has improved, but there are still areas where I would like to improve. I focused on illustrations with pen, ink, and watercolor as well as acrylic painting. My skill with using acrylic paint is my best improvement. You can see the improvement in small details when comparing my spider painting and my Inclusion Design. In the first painting, the black background was a thin layer that I painted after the spider, which messed up the original shape of the legs, and I had to repaint parts of them. I also had trouble with smaller details (paint gathering at the edges of sections, making confident strokes). My Inclusion Design I was very careful with paint being evenly layered and not making shaky strokes. The border between the halo and the background and the background in cleaner, the details on the face are layered and don’t get blended together or smudged. I’m proud of my improvements, and the choose-you-own-materials rule makes it so you can focus on where you need to focus to get better.

There is one big area that I need to put a lot of work into: backgrounds. In almost every single image above, there is either a simple ink-wash, one or two colors blended together, or just no added background at all. I want to focus on creating interesting, engaging backgrounds to make whatever or whoever I’m drawing/painting will be a part of something, not just in some dull empty void. I’ll make it a goal that in future classes and in my independent art, to practice landscapes, patterns, and settings for the subjects of my art. An example of this is the spiderweb in my Circle project. The spider is in background that makes sense, looks good, and adds more circles (which had to be incorporated into the work).

This has been a fast paced, eventful semester, in both art and in my other classes. Foundations of art was far more manageable with due-dates and time given in class to work on projects. I already work fairly quickly to get projects that I’m proud of, but at first this class seemed overwhelming at first even for the pace I was used to. Writing artist statements was in the very back of my head, because before this semester they were only due at the final. The first few weeks I put off writing the statements, which made a few things missing in my gradebook. That was a slap in the face. This class has improved my work ethic by a lot.