AP 2D 

I think that my work throughout this year not only showed how I improved in my artistic ability, but also through my thinking. I started out by trying to do something more realistic with the charcoal drawings of the dancers, but after that didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped, you can see that my art shifted throughout the year to being less realistic and more idea focused. I focused on colors and patterns rather than realism in many of my works. Also at the beginning of the year I had a lot of works that were one single head in the frame, and through the year I tried to change that and move into a variety of subjects. Although I did end up circling back and connecting some of my final projects to my first ones, my ideas became more complex, and the way I experimented with showing them became more unique. In SI #11, I layered different views to show my idea, and in SI #14, I worked with making every aspect of my art connect in some way to the subject. The sewing was connected to darning pointe shoes, the Xs to a cross tape at center stage, the image of myself dancing.

This inquiry question that I explored really showed me that realism takes a really long time, and I can see in some non-inquiry related work that I’m capable of it, but it just takes a lot of time and patience. I think those really small details that realism requires are difficult for me to focus on and that may be part of the reason why I like working so much. I love spending hours on a project, but I like shading with colors, or collaging in patterns rather than sharpening my pencil over and over again to get the tip of a wing feather. I learned through this process that I struggle with practicing, I often want to just get right into the final, and sometimes this contributes to my downfall in a couple projects. Like in SI #6, I didn’t do any test strips with the oil pastels I ended up using, even though I hadn’t used them in a couple of years. This resulted in my final project not blending how I wanted and the colors looking off from what I desired. This showed as well in SI #13, when I did several practice sketches, making sure I got the shading just right and finalizing all of the places I would be layering ink. I also did a couple test strips printing with the fork where I practiced different strokes I could use like cross hatching, and I also made sure I got a feel for what I would have to do to make the ink thicker versus lighter. This practice paid off for an overall more high quality piece.

I’m really proud of my captivating colors, I think throughout the year I continued to use materials like oil pastel that allows me to use bright colors and pull in a viewer with the color contrast. In SI #3 especially, I tried to use the bright whites and yellows on the highlights to draw in the viewer’s eye as well as create a 3D feeling. I definitely need to work on my subject though, even though I worked on making less faces towards the middle and end of the year, I still struggled with having my subject not just be a single person. In the future I’d like to work more on interhuman relationships and relationships between humans and nature inside of an inquiry so that I can incorporate more subjects, rather than just one person.