Foundations of Art

Mariah Sawyer

Ms. Medsker

Foundations of Art 6/7M

June 15, 2019

Written Reflection

In Foundations of Art this year, I have improved vastly and I now have much higher standards for the art I will create later in life and in school especially. I think much of this improvement I have developed comes from the fact that I found my artistic voice throughout these projects and I have more creativity. I have found that one of the hardest parts of art is finding a base to start your project off of and deciding what would be the best subject of your artwork. I have definitely found that throughout the year I have a new view on my art and can more easily decide what will work best for which projects. This aspect of my artwork also reflects onto materials used for my projects, in art it is super important to select the exact tools that will work best for your project and use them absolutely correctly or in a way that will create your desired look and outcome. Proper use of materials was a very challenging and prominent part of most of my projects but in particular I found this most relevant in the linoleum prints project because if you do something just slightly off it will show in your final print and mess the entire thing up, that is why we had to make so many separate prints.

One part of my artwork that I felt like was consistent all year and was strong was the emotions that shined through in my project. I felt that all through the year if I was working on a specific project that I wanted to portray certain emotions, I was able to show those with good technique. I also feel like this ability to show emotions through my work is visible in other aspects of my education like in english, which I feel is my strongest class because in my writing I can also show this connection well even without the visual aspect. This idea of visual art showing emotion connects with the way we have to critique our own work to show that it shows all the required aspects of the assigned project and include all the required elements. We have learned which parts of our projects are strongest and weakest depending on the principles of design for that specific assignment.

One of the most challenging aspects of art for me throughout the year was obviously making sure every project I made was able to fit every part of the criteria for the specific piece but specifically by putting some of my ideas back and saving them for another piece in order to make the assigned one properly. For example, my Creative Color design which is probably the piece I am most proud of out of everything had to include 84 colors and even though I feel like it would have looked better without so many shade going on and I also think I should have organized the colors more well. On the other hand, my painting of my Surrealist Collage was a very hard project to complete because the criteria of the project was to make it look like a collage we put together. I think it is interesting to compare these two projects as they both contain the same type of media but one turned out being one of my favorites while the other is one of my least favorites. Thinking in this critical fashion brings me to one of my hardest projects, my oil pastel color study. Many people have had their own ideas as to what my horse is and it gives me a stronger idea of my own of what is represents.