I think that my work in this school year illustrates my strengths in drawing more than anything else. Most of my best work was made with a pencil and paper or even scratchboard. I learned even more about drawing with graphite even more than I already knew. A good example of new learning is with a material that I started using this year called a tortillion. A tortillion is used to blend in different shades of pencil together to make the piece look smoother rather than like a clean cut-off of two different shades. I started using the tortillion on the realistic self-portrait and the mixed media charcoal drawing of my dog. My weaker suits are my sculpting skills and painting. I wasn't super proud of my wire sculptures and my assemblage sculpture. I don't usually work with pliers and wire so I didn't really know how to make the sculpture firmly stay on the other pieces of wire. In the assemblage sculpture, I wanted to make the full body but I didn't have the right materials or enough time so I kind of just put the color I wanted on the assemblage. When I painted I drew out the sketch first which usually looked good but when I painted it always didn't turn out right because of the size of the brush and I wasn't very patient with the drying of the paint.

I thought that I really improved over the year considering my first drawings and my realistic drawings. My first self-portrait looks nothing like me and my second self-portrait looks a lot like me. Also, the charcoal drawing of my dog (which I think is my best work) looks almost exactly like my dog which is a really big step from my first pieces. Also at the beginning of the year when I had an assignment I usually looked for inspiration for a lot of different pieces but towards the end of the year I was coming up with my own ideas with no inspiration from anything I've seen. I thought I really progressed with my art skills from the beginning to the end of the year because the realistic stuff has shading and different color contrast which is way better than before this school year. Before the school year, my attempt at shading was not good at all, I used to just draw cartoons but now I know what it takes to draw realistically.

This school year of art was filled with challenging projects and different obstacles but for me, the most challenging project was for sure the wire sculpture. I never figured out how to secure the wires in place they always kept sliding out of place which was really frustrating also the wire was sometimes quite hard to cut and squeeze together. The pliers sometimes weren't strong enough or the wire cutters were hard to squeeze together. Another challenge was when I was squeezing a hook on the wire and it squeezed against itself. then sometimes the little hole was too small for the needle-nose pliers to fit through to pull the wire away from itself. That project was definitely the hardest for me.

There was a lot of good art I produced this year but my favorite piece was the charcoal drawing of my dog Sophie. I took a picture of her and graphed it and in the end, the drawing looked exactly the same as the picture. Also, I really liked the picture of her looking at the treat in my hand. It captured the perfect moment in time. In the actual picture, there was my mom's bedroom in the background which she didn't want to be in the drawing so I made this cool gradient of charcoal and made an outline of Sophie with an eraser so it kind of looks like she is glowing. I thought I did really well shading and using all the different materials to the best of my ability. I really liked how the drawing came out and all of my family members think it is the best one I did.

My artistic goals for the future and this summer are to start customizing more things and make a pair of custom shoes that are wearable so I can wear them outside of my house. But for the future, I want to go to college for art because I want to be a designer. Specifically a designer for different logos or maybe even for movie covers or cartoon shows. Also, I kind of want to work for some game companies and give ideas for the developers to add to the game. But my main goal is to go to college for marketing and making logos for companies. I still need to work on that goal by thinking up creative ways to make logos but eventually, I will get there.

To sum up this year I had a lot of fun in this class and I improved a lot. I hope to keep improving over the years and achieve the goal of going to college for art.