Advanced Art & Design

Semester 1 Reflection

Over this semester I worked on having animals show movement, in this class I mainly focused on working with paint but also tried to branch out as much as possible; working with clay, colored pencil, markers, and pen. I think over this semester I was most successful with working on my process, in the past have worked really quick and as soon as one small part doesn't look right I give up and restart, so that was been something that I have been working on. I also feel that the way I came up with my projects was really improved from years past. I spent a lot of time focusing on the why, why I wanted to create this piece in this way and why I chose this animal. I think that really helped me when it came to not trashing a piece as fast because I spent more time coming up with the idea and how it was going to work. I think overall my biggest struggle is coming up with ideas, I have been better about coming up with ideas but executing them has been a struggle, I find that I get frustrated when something doesn't look right and in my effort to fix it I end up making it worst.

For next semester I have a few goals, one being that I want to change my sustained investigation to focusing on a more technical side, almost scientific illustrations but not totally, also I want to continue my work with how I have been coming up with my art but focusing more of my energy on getting it done and to a point where I feel like I can call it done. To do these things I am going to set aside time everyday to pick away at my art, this will prevent me from making mistakes because I have been staring at my art for hours. I hope that all of these things will help me grow as an artist.

End of Year Reflection

Over the course of this year, I feel that I have improved greatly in the way that I approach the projects that are assigned. In the past, I would just jump into a project and end up doing 4 different projects because as I worked my ideas and the way I wanted my final image to look changed, but this year I felt that I took a step back and worked on the process of creating. I would usually begin my projects by coming up with an idea that presented the prompt in question, then I would sketch out my ideas a few times to get an idea of the layout that I wanted. Then I would typically do some research on the topic and find some reference images. Once this was done I would move into my project, I believe that this shows how my work has improved because it highlights the change in thinking in my work over the past few years. I focused on the process of creating my project rather than just winging it and hoping that it came out ok. I also think that I greatly improved in my material choice, I began to branch out over the course of this year. I started working with clay, printing, collage, and woodwork. I believe that this shows improvement and progression because in years past I have been very focused on a few materials.

I believe that my work highlights both my strengths and weaknesses. One of my biggest weaknesses that can be seen in my art is just persistence, I am very quick to give up on a work and just change my ideas when things start to go wrong. This is something that I tried to work through this year and I think it can be seen throughout my art, with just the layers and layers in the painting pieces and the kind of unplanned similarities that can be seen. I think that in my effort to try and stick with just one image made it hard to enjoy and create something that I felt was good, even though I spent a lot of time planning each project I felt that the actual projects were often just thrown together and lacking some of that creative fire that my other works in the past have had. But I think that in a way this also highlights my creativeness to kind of take a piece that I didn't like and turn it into a collage or add another material to make it something better. I feel that my goal to stick with a project over this year was such a catch 22 because sometimes I felt that I hated it and just wanted to restart and other times I felt that I became more creative because I was forced to make the image work and create something better out of what I had made.

One of the things that I struggled with this year was inspiration because I didn't have that 24/7 access to the art room. I often felt that I just didn't have ideas and nothing was flowing artistically. I think this was because this year was so crazy and all over the place both in school and in my personal life I found it hard to focus on just art and not the other million things going on. In past years I have always spent extra time in the art rooms because I love seeing what other people have created and that always inspires me to do more and try other things. So I think that this year and not having that constant inspiration around me made me not think about my art as much and made it super hard when it was time to do something creative to block out the rest of the life things going on. I think that this was the most challenging part of the year because at some points I didn't feel inspired and art became more of a homework assignment rather than the way it used to be and all I wanted it to be as fun and awesome but it was super hard to keep things exciting when I was basically by myself for most of the art things that were happening. But I think that I learned a lot about myself as an artist and I look forward to a much better next year!

One thing that I'm proud of this year was my ability to find random things and turn them into art, at times I didn't always have the perfect materials that I wanted to use for my project so I kind of had to make do with what I had. I think that because I was so scrappy with my materials it made me be creative because I had to think of other ways to make the image look like I wanted it to be. One example of this is that my mom never uses just black paint and so for all of my painting stuff I borrowed a lot of her materials and after the first few projects, I ran out of black paint so I was forced to look at all the different colors I had and create my own black-ish color. This was something that I had a super fun time with too, some days I would just sit down and play with paint colors and see what I could create. Another thing that I'm proud of was I decided I wanted to do some photo editing stuff so I learned by watching some youtube videos and then was able to edit some photos to take stuff away and add different things in which I had so much fun with and that is something that I really really enjoyed!

Over the summer and in the future I have a few goals that I want to accomplish, one being that I don't want to work with the same material two projects in a row, I want to mix it up constantly and get a really good feel with multiple media. I also want to have a more forced inquiry question, one that has some more science and things I can spend time researching and stuff. And lastly, I want to try and create some kind of art every single day of the summer, whether it's a small doodle on a napkin or a huge painting, I just want to keep doing art and try to incorporate it into my everyday life more. Because I really do love art and I feel like over this year life became so overwhelming that I lost the reasons that I love art. I think that incorporating any small act of art into my days will help to remind me of all the beauty that art has to offer and bring back why I loved art and why I used to spend every single study hall and advisory in the art room.