2D Design

2D design was probably my favorite class of this semester, I love art and I also love an opportunity to be creative without boundaries, both of these things were available to me in 2d. I loved how we were given a theme, question or idea and just ran with that with zero limits on what our project could be except for that it had to be 2 dimensional. I felt like I grew a lot as an artist through out this semester and I came in doing average work. Through the work I have put in I have developed my own voice and style in my art which usually is acrylic or water color paintings. I have developed many different skills or further developed some existing ones. A skill which I am most pleased to have in my arsenal now is the ability to paint and draw with water color. This is a technique or medium that I have previously stayed away from in fear or runny paints. But I started painting in water color towards the end of the unit and have painted a few water color paintings in my own time since and I am very pleased with how they look. Acrylic painting is something I learned how to do last year and is still my preferred medium, but I have excelled in this department and have changed my abilities with acrylic paint since the beginning of the unit.

I have been successful with painting this semester. But multiple kinds of painting, in the past I could really only paint with acrylic and now I can do water color quite confidently. I was even in a studio in Portland talking to an artist about learning oil, which she was confident I could learn given the transferable-ish techniques from acrylic to oil. My greatest success this year was the sustained investigation series, that showcases my best work ever and I'm so proud of how that came out. All of the pieces sure took a long time but they came out spectacular and you can really feel the vibe I was going for in those pieces. As I said in my artist statement for the final piece, I would like to continue this series because I love it so much, but I am pleased with where I ended it for class and in truth it is endless, and I could just as well keep making those pieces for the rest of my life and never be done as there is so much food in the world.

A struggle I had this year was working on abstract things as well as hyper realistic pieces. The hardest pieces for me this year were the abstract work and the duck stamp. The duck stamp was a challenge because of how intricate the king eider duck is feathered and also because it needed to be realistic. It took me longer than any other project and I'm not too pleased with how it came out. The other one that was really hard for me was the abstract work, and this was my greatest failure of the year. I couldn't even say what I was really going for there and coming up with an entirely abstract idea was really hard for me, as I usually work with an abstract thought and paintings that might not make sense but have a major base in reality. Such as the beautiful oops and the first SI. Both of those are abstract in thought but the actual painting itself is quite clear and you can tell what it is. I picked up that style from one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dali.

I would like to continue to do four-ish pieces of art each month as we did in 2d, as this rapidly pushed my abilities as an artist forward and I like to accumulate cool art. Overall I really liked this class and would recommend it to anyone who wants to do art or get better as an artist. I will also continue to do art regularly as part of my own artistic journey.

-finn f.