Advanced Art & Design 

I think that throughout the year, I improved my work by learning how to build off of each piece for the next one. Especially at the end of the year, I really liked that big collage I did, and so I made a lot of work that was similar, or at least inspired by those colors and composition. At the beginning of the year, especially at the beginning of my sustained investigation, I was struggling to figure out what I even wanted to focus on, so each work kind of felt disconnected from the previous ones. As I leaned more into my music investigation, I think I got more and more specific as I kept going and investigated the theme more deeply. 

I'm not sure if by just looking at the work you can tell, but I really struggle, especially this year, to turn my work in on time. I think that can be seen in some of my works because some look unfinished, because I just turned them in for a grade, even before it was fully done. Many times, I hope to go back and finish them and improve them, but I often lose motivation. My work also shows my strength of creativity. I think that when I learn, I am good at doing what I know I am supposed to do, but in art, I like to do what I like to do rather than what I am expected to do. I think you can see that in my progression from the beginning to the end of the year. My work at the beginning of the year is more realistic and detailed as opposed to the work later in the year, which is more stylized and focuses on a theme that may not be super obvious. 

This year, I have really struggled to like my final work, and that has made me really unmotivated to create more work, because I use my own work as inspiration so much. When I really like what I create, I tend to use similar ideas and composition in my next works, and it motivates me to create more. This year, I think that I started with a few works that I didn't like, and at the beginning of my sustained investigation, I wasn't super into my ideas, so it was hard to come up with ideas for work. Because of this, I was really unmotivated to create work, and it led to creating work that wasn't very good, and the cycle continued.

I am most proud of how I leaned into my style this year. I draw these little doodles of squiggly people all of the time on my school papers and things, and I really enjoyed using them in my more polished work. It made creating art so much more fun because I didn't feel the pressure of making things realistic, and instead, I just focused more on the process of making the project.

In the future, I want to just continue to make time for creating. I think that my creative time can so easily get taken up by school work or a job or just life in general, but I really enjoy making art, and I want to make sure that I make time for myself to create in any way. I also want to keep exploring with colors and shapes. I think that, as I said above, I've been having fun diving into my doodles, and so I think that making sure I enjoy the artistic process and not getting bogged down in artistic processes that I don't enjoy because I feel like I need to do something realistic.