Foundations of Art 

As an artist I am a learner, I am learning art, so I think my art is my strengths and weaknesses. Some things are definitely better than others when it comes to my art projects for this year. I realized that though I may like painting to a certain point, it becomes frustrating and it is definitely not my forte. I tend to get impatient, and that is not a good trait to have when it comes to any art, but painting in particular. There are all these tiny little details that I have to make my paintbrush do without bending the wrong way, smudging, etc. So maybe small detail with unpredictable materials is a better way to describe my weakness in painting. I think my art shows my creativity though. I think there are certainly subjects I focus on more than others, but I tried to use foundations of art as a very experimental class where I not only did what I wanted but I tried to do something different every time.

 I think I improved so much over the year. Looking back at some of the very first projects I did, I was very technically weak. There was graphite showing, the white of the paper was shown through, the lines were scratchy. I learned a lot of new techniques too to implement into my artwork to make it more interesting and just overall better. As the year moves on I certainly see mediums that were not my strong point, but overall, my attention to detail got so much better, therefore making my art so much more realistic to life and my own imagination. 

The most challenging project for me would have to have been the painted collage. I did fine with teh collage, but as I often do,I struggled to make it simple. I had this extremely difficult and complex collage with a huge color palette and two days to paint it as realistically as possible. Just the idea of it stressed me out, but trying to get all the small details of a human face and trying to mix all the colors to just the right shade was so tedious and really difficult. 

This may seem obvious but my extended zoomed shoe drawing. It won an honorable mention for the Scholastics award which is amazing. I’m super proud of myself for that. I’m also really happy Ms. Medsker pushed me. At first it was just the marker and I really liked it, but she told me that that was to be a background and I should add a lot of little detail to the foreground, so I did, and I’m glad I did so. I think that the amount of detail I implemented into that drawing was really powerful. I also used some really nice color contrasting which I think looked really cool. Then I added words which are not always seen in art. I tried to make them cursive so it was like a drawing of the words, and they were part of the design, they didn’t really have separate meaning. They were part of the drawing.

Some goals for later on are to keep pushing myself technically and creatively. I think I have some really good creativity showing in my art for this past year, but I think I can push myself even more. And I think technical skill is always a good thing. Even if you choose to disregard all the technical rules that almost makes your art more technical because you are purposely and deliberately NOT following the rules. That is also a goal for me, is to not follow the strict rules of realism so much. I want to start to play around with distorted figures and things that aren’t realistic.