Semester 1 Reflection

This semester I believe I have been most successful with consistently producing final projects that I am proud of. In past art classes, many of my projects were ”done”, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with the end product whether it was due to an idea I didn’t like or execution that felt unfinished. This year as I look back on my works and see many I put much time and effort into resulting in pieces I love. This has involved putting in a lot of time, restarting for many of my pieces, and not sloppily wrapping up a piece but pushing myself to work until I feel it’s complete. I’ve grown a lot this semester as an artist, not only in a broader sense of my art being simply “better”, but I’ve become more comfortable using materials such as acrylics and diversifying my mediums. Part of the latter comes from working at home; I’ve found myself picking up things around the house (i.e the mirror) and saying “I could use this for art”. Additionally, I’ve never experimented with digital art before and this class helped me take a step forward towards being more comfortable using applications like photoshop, illustrator, and acorn. My favorite pieces this semester have been my Beautiful Oops (which I was not expecting, especially after the line/oops drawing from last year I hated), my Design with Circles (which involved a lot of research into the context of the art, plus I loved the process of creating it), my Stars and Stripes reDesign, my Donate Life design, maybe my Duck Stamp, and the majority of my Sustained Investigation. See? I think I have more favorites this year than “eh”s.

This semester more than any other I have struggled with meeting the due date for some of my assignments. I think this issue might be the result of a combination of factors. First, as I talked about in the first paragraph, I’ve made sure to work on pieces this year until I’m happy with the end project. I’ve never been a fast-moving artist, from idea generation to execution I tend to move quite slowly. The additional time I put into making each piece complete definitely worked against my attempt at time management. Second, I found that once I got behind on one piece I got caught in a domino effect of working on the last project when I was supposed to be working on a new one. I ended up getting stuck in a circle of getting one piece in late and not being able to have a fresh start with the next. I’m not one to put work in late, so seeing so many missing assignments in PowerSchool was quite stressful and began to put a damper on the process of creating art which I would usually enjoy. Finally, I think I struggled with using digital art. While I appreciated the introduction to new programs and ways of creating art, I never felt like I was well-versed enough to create a fully digital piece. I tried a few times to make entirely (or even partially) digital pieces, but after hours of trying to figure out how the applications worked, I knew I didn’t have enough know-how to finish the work digitally and had to restart.

Considering both my successes of this semester and my struggles, I would say my biggest goal moving forward should be to work on my time management. It’s very important to me that I am able to put in enough time for each piece so that I am happy with them, but at the same time I cannot continue with having late/missing assignments. My goal would be to have every project completely done by the deadline, but if I occasionally still need more time on something I want to feel more comfortable with submitting what I have for the time being so I have something in and can go back later to finish up. I would also like to step out of my comfort zone in art with regard to the subject of my works. One thing I enjoyed this semester was creating art with more meaning behind it (for example the Stars and Stripes reDesign). I would like to be creating art that I, if coming across it in a gallery, would be interested in looking at. I find that when I have a purpose (a “why” if you will) I am more driven and excited about the process of creating my pieces.