Foundations of Art
Final Essay
My artwork is always very special to me, all of my pieces have something that is personally connected to me and sometimes you can’t tell what. My artwork shows my strengths as a learner because with the tools and materials I'm familiar with, my artwork comes out better because I don’t have to figure out the texture or how to use something. But it also shows that I can turn mistakes into art. Sometimes I spill paint on my canvas and have to fit it into my landscape or when using scratch board it’s unforgiving so any mark I make is permanent but I don’t turn into a Debbie downer after that, I fix it if I can and if I can’t I change my perspective. Some weakness you can see through my work is probably time management. I know on my google sites page you can’t see the turn in dates. You can see sometimes where my art could have had more potential and I couldn’t reach that with the circumstances in my life.
This year has been crazy and challenging. Still dealing with the consequences of covid was interesting at the least. But with that I have had a lot of time to work on my art and experiment with different materials. Looking at my site's page from the beginning of the year I can tell that I had some good ideas. I just didn’t know where to take them or what to do more of. But now at the end of the year and doing my final project I realized that I chose one of the hardest materials I had to work with this year. Which was a linoleum block. I decided to give it one more try for my final because I liked the challenge of it. This is how I know my work has improved because at the beginning of the year I couldn’t fill a canvas and now I'm challenging myself even more.
The most challenging project for me was honestly probably linear perspective or my realistic self portrait. I thought these were the most challenging because for linear perspective I had to have my brain think in another perspective which was the point of the project. Yeah I would say it taught me a lot but what came with trying to train my brain was the frustration about not producing the product that I wanted and the endless youtube videos. The realistic self portrait was also a hard one because I hate portraits. I thought that I was done drawing them when I got out of middle school. That was so not true. I was embarrassed in class to be looking at myself in the mirror trying to sketch out my face shape, my big nose, lips. All of my insecurities came out during that project.
The project that made me the most proud was my color design of the fairies from Tinker Bell. This project was both challenging and we had some freedom in it. This project we had to use the color wheel to create 84 different colors and somehow fit in on a canvas but also paint it in a pretty picture. I used many many MANY paint pallets for this one. But I’m most proud of this piece of mine because Tinker Bell was the show I always watched as a kid. It was my comfort show. So this is that personal piece of mine that you wouldn’t think is so personal. I’m also proud of myself for remembering all of the colors.
My art goals for the summer are different to anything that we’ve been doing in class. I make jewelry on my own time, specifically earrings and this is something that I want to start to sell. I’m not sure where to start or where I'm going to find the time, but it’s gonna happen. I would also like to create an ear bonnet for my horse since I’ve already spent my life savings on him, why not make something instead of buying it. But those are my big goals for this summer. Right now I've been working on my art dresser (where I store all my supplies) and I want to get some different materials in there like scratch board and linoleum blocks so I can experiment more with different materials and get better. No better time to do this when I have the whole summer and especially on rainy days. i'm very sad this art year is over. I love this class and I love Mrs. Medsker. This definitely motivated me to do better.