2D Design

Overall 2D design semester class has been a super fun and very interesting experience taking the course. I feel as though I've grown a lot as an artist and I have acquired many new skills and techniques that I can go on to use in more art classes that I take and just in any day life as well. I've learned to use so many new and different materials during this course and the assignments we were given encouraged me to branch out and try new things that even though might have been unfamiliar and uncomfortable to me ended up being super fun and interesting to learn about and use. During this class, we were assigned assignments that required us to use Photoshop which is a digital editing app and I had never used it before. At first, I didn't really think that I liked using Photoshop for art purposes but during the process and after seeing the final projects that I created with it I can say now that I really did like the final outcome even though the process was a lot to figure out. I think that this class has helped me figure out what I'm good at concerning art and what I can work on a lot more in the future as an artist. During this class, I think I succeeded a lot with using mediums/techniques that I was familiar with such as collaging like in my “Mixed Media Contour”  piece of art,  as well as using colored markers to create my “Hand narrative” design piece, and also I used acrylic paint a couple of times but the time I felt was most successful was for my second “sustained investigation” piece of art where I painted a monarch butterfly and I just think that it came out beautifully, and I used the paint really well. I succeeded a lot by using materials sometimes that were familiar to me,  meaning I had used them in the past but I felt that I could still even get a little more skilled at using and those three examples I think I did just that and used them to the best of my ability and experimented a lot with all three of those projects. I succeeded in using my prior knowledge of certain materials to learn how to use them even better than I knew already.

Overall throughout the entire semester of this class, I would say that I definitely struggled quite a bit. My struggles came when it came to coming up with ideas at first,  sometimes it would even take me an entire class just to decide what I wanted to do for a  certain assignment. Another thing that I definitely struggled with was time management for almost every project. I found it very difficult to keep up my art and make it very good and devote a lot of time to it while also keeping up with all my other classes. I realized that my art is very important and that sometimes I was prioritizing other classes over my art and often was turning in work late because I could not finish it because I was busy with other homework but the key was that I just needed to find a balance. I struggled with some specific assignments one being the digital painting project. This project was so time-consuming, I think that I spent probably around 80 hours or more on the assignment and it was really hard. I started over twice because I didn't like how it was turning out, but after starting over twice I realized that I just needed to trust the process. An aspect of this project that I struggled with was learning how to use all the tools in Photoshop it took me a minute to understand and I even had to look up a couple of videos to show me how to do certain things. Another way that I struggled in this class was inputting a lot of the art elements of design into my art pieces, such as lines textures patterns color, etc… I usually thought that my art would be done before it was really a great piece of art and I realized that I was forgetting a lot of those components of art and I struggled a little with how to implement them into my art pieces. I do think that over the entire class, and now by the end of it I have a little bit of a better sense of how to incorporate the art elements of design into my artwork which has made my art develop and become much better.   

Continuing forward as an artist I do have a couple of artistic goals that I want to continue to develop and grow. I began to learn how to use acrylic paint better during my second “sustained investigation” art piece, but I honestly feel as though I could still learn out to use it better and use it in different ways or in different forms. Going forward I also really want to be able to create artwork and feel more confident about it. I found myself asking Miss Medsker a lot of questions about Whether my art is “good enough.” I want to have my own gauge in my mind of if my art is “good” or if there's something I can do to make it better and what that is and to be able to figure all that out on my own. Though I'm not taking 3D design next semester ( because it doesn't fit into my schedule)  I hope to continue to make a lot of art during my own time and go back and look at assignments I did during this class and maybe we do a project a different way and see if I can make it even better (in my opinion), or just take a different angle/direction on it than the piece I made for the actual assignment. Additionally, moving forward I also really want to broaden my capabilities of using different mediums that I've never used before or some that I used once or twice this year that I either liked or didn't like but could gain more experience with. Overall I feel as though my journey during 2D design was honestly been filled with lots of ups and downs and lots of fun but also lots of frustration. I'm super proud of some art pieces I created and maybe less proud of some others but overall I learned so much during this class even though it was only a semester and I will carry what I have learned with me as an artist. I tried my hardest and did all my work to the best of my ability and am very proud of all that I have accomplished.