Foundations of Art

Foundations of Art Reflection

I think that there are many ways that my work illustrates my strengths and weaknesses as a learner. One huge way my art reflects my weaknesses is how I struggle to learn skills quickly. I have always struggled to attain a lot of new tactics and information quickly which is why I struggled so much on assignments like negative space leaves, where it was the first time I have been introduced to a form of art. On the other hand, I did well(in my opinion) on the wire sculpture because I have previous knowledge and experience working with wire and wire tools. One way that my work illustrates my strengths as a learner is how I can learn through examples and creating my own tactics. I think I have always been a visual learner which is how math and art have helped me so much as a learner. On my scratchboard projects when I came to a point where I started to struggle I would look at the provided examples and work from there trying out different and new tools until I created the texture I liked. I think that this can also be shown through the sgraffito, wire, and self-portrait.

My work has greatly improved through what I have learned and made in the foundation of art. If you look at my first piece of work you can see all the sketch lines, the improper dimensions, and the bad shading. My duck stam shows how I have improved on dimensions and bodies, my hands show how I have improved on sketch lines, and my self-portrait have shown how I have improved on shading.

The most challenging project for me was the charcoal drawing. I think that there are many reasons why this project was such a challenge for me. One issue was that this was the first time using charcoal as a medium, and this became a challenge because I struggled to shade especially since what I was drawing was light. Another challenge was time, I knew to some extent what I was doing, but I struggled to get everything done in the time I had meaning it was not only not the best it could be but I was very stressed every night working on it. Finally, the most challenging issue for me was how much I didn’t like it, this project followed the self-portrait which I was extremely proud of so I was expecting to well on the charcoal drawing, but that was not the case. I was not proud of my work and no matter how much I changed I could not get my work to look like the picture and this greatly added to my stress and overall takeaway from this project.

The project I was most proud of was my independent scratchboard project. I think the main reason I was so proud of this was because it reflected on many of the improvements I have made throughout the year. Also compared to my previous scratchboard of the same cat you can see huge improvements and a much better reflection of the shape, fur patterns, and facial expression of the cat. This was always going to be a gift for my grandmother as it was her cat, so I was quite disappointed with how the first scratchboard of the cat came out, meaning that I worked very hard to create a better image of her cat. I was so proud that I was comfortable to give her the picture of the cat and I am glad that I had at least one piece of art that came from this year that I can positively look back on.

I have many art goals for the summer and the future in general. For the summer I just want to produce, this is mainly to keep up my skills and work at practicing what I have learned this year also I generally really enjoy art so it would be sad if I didn’t get to practice my work. In the future, I would really like to learn how to work more with color. I have tried to work with color as you can see from a couple of my art pieces but I truly struggled and only felt proud of my works that were on a black or grey scale. As you can see from my duck stamp I really struggle with shading and detail when it comes to color mediums so I would really like to practice and improve my skills with colorful mediums.