Foundations of Art

This year in Foundations of Art I worked on a lot of different projects, and while some of them were different, the majority of them included my dog in some way. I included my dog in those projects because I enjoy drawing dogs over most things. I want a career in training and working with dogs, and my current job is at a dog kennel for exactly that reason. Dogs are obviously something I enjoy as a topic more than pretty much anything else, hence the number of projects including my own dog. Within the topic of making projects include my dog, I was also using a pretty huge variety of materials. I definitely struggled with some more than others and enjoyed a few materials significantly more than some others, but overall the challenge for me was to find ways to include my dog in a way that I liked in these projects. This definitely meant spending more time testing methods with the materials we were using to make sure that in the end, I got what I wanted out of them.

Throughout this school year, you can definitely see improvements in my work. The google site portfolio makes it easier to see that I think. My work overall has definitely gotten cleaner, more accurate, and I’m generally happier with most of what I make now as opposed to what I made at the beginning of the year. My willingness to mix or experiment with materials has definitely increased, as has the amount of time I actually spend on each project, for better or worse. My time management with projects hasn’t changed much, I still usually turn things in a little late because I tend to be fairly slow working on things and rarely actually have a chance to bring things home since everything I have brought home has ended up at least partially ruined between switching houses and working after school.

Scratchboard, self-portraits, and painting were the most challenging things for me for different reasons. Scratchboard, while not the worst or most complicated material, definitely was very time consuming and stressed me out because of the time it took, and primarily the fact that I couldn’t erase marks I made to make changes which also meant sketching a lighter first draft wasn’t really an option. Self-portraits were a struggle for me because I hate drawing people for any reason, and I hate drawing myself even more. I feel like a lot of people probably had the same or similar complaints about that project. Painting was a huge struggle for me this year more because of the fact that we were doing it in a hybrid model and I had a hard time painting at my house because it could get so messy. Add to that that everyone else is home trying to get their own work done and I have pets with no awareness of if they’re walking through wet paint and it just didn’t really work out the way I wanted it to. Plus it seemed like every time I would go to work on it the paint containers would have split open and be a huge mess of mixed-up paint in the bag anyway so I struggled to work on those projects even when I did have the time.

I am most proud of the linoleum prints and the mixed-media project because I really like how they came out and I spent a lot of time on each of them. The mixed-media project took me a lot of time to complete, but I enjoyed doing it and I am proud of how it came out overall. I spent a lot of time using charcoal to do the grass for the background of it and even from one section of that to the next I improved a lot in using charcoal for actual detail work. That paired with India-ink helped me get the fur right over the rest of it and I loved how it turned out. I was proud of the linoleum prints for similar reasons. I spent a lot of time planning and doing detail work on paper and then the block itself, so when I started printing all I really had to do was figure out the actual printing process. Everything else was already mostly done except for some minor adjustments I decided to make, and that left me time to work on getting the colours I wanted in the prints. I am proud of how the prints turned out, and I‘m proud of my time management throughout that project.

I think my work this year definitely shows a lot of my own strengths and weaknesses in different ways. You can see throughout the year how I improved in the actual artwork I was making, and I think you can also see what materials and concepts I struggled with more than others just by looking at what I turned in for different assignments. I know about myself that I tend to struggle, especially in art classes, with completing projects that I don’t really have an interest in completing for a reason other than for school. On the flip side of that, I also know about myself that by making it more something I want to work on, for example incorporating my dog, I am more likely to actually get it done. The same is true for working with a material I don’t really like working with in the first place. To me, it may be more obvious which assignments caused these issues because I was the one working on them, but I think you can kind of tell either way just by looking at how much work I put into each project. Overall I do think my work this year is a good representation of my various strengths and weaknesses in art, especially looking at the whole portfolio.