Foundations of Art

Art Final Essay:

Throughout art this year I have learned a lot about the artistic process and how to create art of many different styles. At the beginning of the year I was not sure how to feel about art class. I didn’t have a liking for art in the past but I was coming into the class simply for the art credit. However, as the year first started and the beautiful oops project came, It actually surprised me that certain types of art could be fun and really rewarding. I think if you were to look at all of my art pieces over this year that you would see a growth in creativity as well as in art skills because the first few units were really technical but as I went on and started to feel more comfortable with doing art, more color and creativity come into the pieces and the precise use of techniques and tools become more evident. For example, the first three projects are all in graphite and have relatively messy lines and maybe a few smudges here and there, but if you look at the last several drawing projects you can see that there was a lot more planning involved and the lines are a lot more clear cut. I think that a lot of my art pieces show both my strengths and weaknesses as a learner. A few examples of this can be seen in the portrait projects because I think one of my better skills in art was being able to organize and plan out my projects.from the beginning. In the portrait projects this was especially evident in the grid lines which would help you go small portion by small portion of the picture to get all of the details into the drawing. Some weaknesses I had during the year included presentation and patience. A few examples of these weaknesses can be found in the printmaking, wire sculpture, and mixed media projects. In the printmaking project it was hard to be patient enough in order to get perfect prints (It took many prints to try to get a near perfect one). During the wire sculpture patience was needed because the wire was very unforgiving and you needed to keep a cool head while dealing with its stubbornness. Finally the mixed media project showed presentation weakness because even though I used the grid lines to organize myself I didn’t fully erase them which made the drawing a little sloppy looking. Overall, I think that this year in art was a learning experience but it was pretty fun to delve into the different realms of art and learn new things.

I think the most challenging unit for me was probably the wire sculpture unit. This was because of the wire’s unwillingness to bend, and the relative amount of work that you had to do just to create a small part of the sculpture. Making the fishhook connections could also be hard because the wire had to be squeezed in order to make the connection tight. If you didn’t angle the hook correctly then you would have to start over and recreate the connection. As you can see mistakes made this project a lot longer than the other projects and it was a process in order to create a sculpture that was not flimsy and would stand up on its own. Another challenging thing about this project was keeping patience because the wire wasn’t easy to bend and it took a lot of time to shape it in order to be the form that you wanted it to be in.

The project that I most enjoyed this year was the surrealism/collage unit. The reason I enjoyed this unit more than the others was that it seemed like it had a good timeline and you had the freedom to mix any paint colors you wanted. Basically you could tailor the paints to your specific project and collage, there was a little bit more artistic freedom allowed during the unit. Another aspect of the project that I liked was that it seemed like there was a really calm mood in the room, everybody was working away on their projects and mixing their paints and it seemed more casual than the other units. Lastly I liked this project because of the end result which I thought turned out pretty well and looked fairly similar to my collage.

My goals for art in the future and this summer are not very ambitious. This summer I may doodle from time to time on a piece of paper but I don’t think I will start any large projects. As for the future, this may be my last art class. Although I did enjoy Foundations of Art this year and I learned a lot. I don’t see myself taking another art class because I am not that interested in furthering my art skills, I would rather put another class towards other credits instead of getting more art credits. Despite that, I will take my knowledge from this class with me for the rest of my life, especially the art history unit. I will look for examples of those in everyday life and that unit will help me recognize them. Lastly, thanks Mrs. Medsker for making art better than I thought it was going to be!