Advanced Art and Design

Semester 1 Reflection

Over the course of the first semester of Advanced Art and Design I think I have learned the most about my own style and the way I like to create art than ever before. I've developed an unexpected passion for digital art and recreating photos using digital art. I have always known that realistic or super detailed drawing isn't my strongest outlet for creating and I always thought that just meant I wasn't good at art. I have now realized that it just isn't my style and when I do make art in a different way it can still be strong and people will still look at it and be intrigued by it. I think realizing this was a really big change in the way I viewed my art and myself as an artist and this had an impact on my work. I think my goal for the next semester of Advanced Art and Design is to continue experimenting and learning about myself as an artist through the ways I create. I think focusing on a sustained investigation will still be possible while doing this and I think it will be helpful to help me have an outline of what I want to create even if the way I do it is new. I predict I will really want to keep on doing the same digital art portraits that I have been doing but I would like to challenge myself and step out of doing that, at least for a few projects in semester 2.

Final Reflection

Looking through the various works I made throughout this year, it is clear that I have found a specific style that I am most comfortable creating in. Obviously with some projects I break out of this one style but I have always wanted to find a way to show a theme through my works so they connect and have a recognizable style. I believe taking advanced art and design was one of the best ways I could achieve those goals. By following a theme through my inquiry question it allowed me to connect my works and this led to me creating them in a similar style and sticking with it.

Something I am proud of doing this year is developing a new passion for digital art. This first time I tried digital I hated it but I decided to stick with it and in doing that, realized that once you learn it, it is super fun. One of my goals with digital art is getting used to using a new program. For all my projects created digitally this year I used an application called Acorn and I am now trying to use Photoshop. Photoshop overall will give me a lot more creative liberty with way more of a variety of brushes, etc, and will be very useful to learn but there is definitely a lot I have to get used to while using it.

The most challenging work I made this year had to be my SI #5, created digitally. This work was more challenging just because there was so much detail to include so it took me many hours. However, because this work was so challenging it ended up being one of my favorites I made and that encourages me to not shy away from picking difficult pieces to make. As I am learning more as an artist I may redo my SI #5 in Photoshop once I get more of a handle on how to use it to see my improvement. I also would love to do more work with clay because I really like the way my clay piece of my dog turned out.