Foundations of Art

Course Reflection:

Even with the pandemic, I feel that this has been a very successful art year for me. I enjoyed most of the projects we have done but more than that I have enjoyed the process of making the artworks. In total I have done 22 projects this year and many more pieces of artwork. It was fun this year to experiment with many different mediums and styles of art.

My work over the past school year has had a lot of ups and downs. As I mentioned before I love the process. I love planning, making sketches and finalizing my ideas. Some things that I struggled with were my patience, my hatred of some mediums, and my time management. During a few projects, namingly the mixed media charcoal drawing, I had lost my patience with the project and its medium so much so that I started not to care how it would turn out and tried to get it done as fast as possible.

My most challenging project this year was the color design painting. The project really pushed my mind and patience to their limits. Though probably one of the most chill projects this year, all of the mixing of paints I had to do was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done in any art class I have taken. I also didn’t really like how the project ended up looking, which didn’t help my mind calm down.

The project that I am most proud of would be the last project we did, the assemblage sculpture. Everything went right with this project from the sketch right up to the final sculpture. This was my favorite piece to work on and I really put a lot of effort into creating it. I believe that this project ended up looking the best out of any of my other projects this year.

I feel like I have improved this year with my artistic skills. I have tried new mediums and different ways of making art. Just looking at my first project and comparing it to my last project, you can tell how much I have improved. Some skills that I have improved would be my sketching and planning, ability to use different mediums, and my quality of artwork in general.

This summer I am planning on editing some of the work I created this year, namingly the realist self portrait. I also plan to experiment with block printing this summer and I already have bought myself a linoleum carving tool and a few linoleum blocks. I am also planning on working on my character models and natural forms for both humans and animals. The final thing that I am going to work on is my sketching and breaking things down into simple shapes.

This school year has been a wild ride that I both enjoyed and was scared of. And because of this great year in Foundations of Art I am really looking forward to my future art classes at FHS.