Foundations of Art

Going into art this year I was kind of nervous. Art isn’t my most favorite subject and I wasn’t that great at, and I knew in high school art we did many different projects using a lot of different tools and techniques. The projects ranged from painting which showed me how to correctly mix paint and how to make sure I applied the paint evenly, then there was charcoal and ink which kind of went along with grid making. I really liked the grid technique because going square by square made everything a lot easier to do. We also did scraffito, linoleum, pure contour, blind contour, and many other projects, with our final one being an independently designed project using the tools and techniques we have learned throughout the year.

My favorite project from this year was definitely the collage project and the eighty-four color project. I really enjoyed the painting unit because I had fun mixing paints and making colorful artworks. With the collage project, I was really proud of how my painting of the collage I made turned out although there definitely were some improvements I could’ve made, such as color matching a little better. I really liked paint mixing with the eighty-four color project and I liked to be creative with the different ways we could apply the color. I made my eighty-four color project based off of an Indian Elephant the had henna designs on it because those have a lot of color and design on them. Other projects I enjoyed were the pixelated color pastel project, pure contour hand with a rubber band, and negative space leaves. Although my favorite unit was the painting unit, I was really proud of my pixelated oil pastel drawing project. I was most proud of this because I remember at one point of the project I was getting frustrated with the project because I had mixed blue, pink, and white oil pastels for so many rows and I had not even gotten to the bridge which was the subject of my picture. However, after I finished it I was really proud of how it turned out and I got a good grade on it.

My least favorite project would have to be wire. The wire was so frustrating to do. During the formative assessments, I got frustrated with my chain link tower because it took me three tries to actually get in to stand up. Then with my cube, I got my cube to stand up and it was straight and it looked really good, then the day it was due as I was leaving for school my laptop fell on it and it got all crooked. My summative assessment of show turned ok but now how I wanted it to. I just wasn’t a huge fan of wire and it was definitely my least favorite and the one I found the most challenging. However, I was least proud of my scratchboard and linoleum prints. I think I would have been more proud of my scratchboard if I had drawn my water then I was copying better. I drew my water vertically when I should have been drawing horizontally and although I did eventually fix it, it was too later and it didn't look like water. Linoleum just didn't turn out well for me. I had an idea of doing anchors but the carving of it didn't turn out very good at all. I decided that I would flip my linoleum block over and I changed my image and did a bridge instead. The bridge didn't turn out too badly and the prints were ok but I definitely think that they could have been much better and I was leat proud of those.

Looking back on the year, I have definitely gotten more comfortable with a lot of different art techniques. At the beginning of the year, one of the first things we did were time capsule drawings. We drew a self-portrait, a still life drawing, and a perspective drawing or a room. Those turned out terrible. Later in the year, however, we did each of those drawing again. Using charcoal and the grid method we drew self-portraits. Despite not blending my charcoal enough, I was really proud of how my portrait turned out. Then, we did hallway perspective drawings. I liked how my hallways perspective drawing and comparing it to the first perspective drawing I did, there was definitely an improvement. For the first still life drawing, I did my water bottle that had a whole bunch of stickers on it. For the second still life that we did later in the year, we did a candy still life. I chose to do skittle because there are many different colors of skittle. I liked how my skittles and the package came out, but then I made the background a lot darker than I wanted to do and I messed up on the background and that took away from the skittles, but there was an improvement in drawing the 3-D objects. These three drawings helped to show my improvement throughout the year especially and I was the proudest of my self-portrait in the end.

Overall, I really learned a lot from art this year and definitely was proud of how I did. As a learner, I wasn't always happy with how strict some of the requirements for some of the projects were but I really liked how we could always pick our own subject for everything. I also liked how Ms.Medsker demonstrated the projects to us and gave us a visual of how to do each project and not just verbal instructions because I would be confused about how to go about the project. I also like how she gave examples of outcomes of the project from the past so we knew what ours should look like. I also really enjoyed how we could kind of work at our pace for everything and of course, there were deadlines to meet for each project but if you finished a project early you could move ahead instead of waiting for everyone to be done. It really helped me how flexible Ms.Medsker was with callbacks and letting people stay after school to work on projects in order to meet deadlines. I really enjoyed foundations of art this year and I found a new liking of different art techniques that I hadn’t always been fond of.