Final Thoughts

Overall, this semester I have learned how to imitate real life in my art. The two most important concepts I have learned within that are working slowly and not making things too complicated. I used to work more quickly, sometimes not correcting small mistakes and favoring completion over perfection.

I learned, though, that I will always be more satisfied with a work that I bothered to take time to polish and fix. In my value self-portrait, I worked slowly, carefully moving my brush and painting over my mistakes, however small. I also learned when to stop adding details. Sometimes, in art forms like mandalas, complexity makes it beautiful and eye-catching, but I was making art that required more simplicity, or else it would look too cluttered and ununified.

By the time I was making my value self-portrait, I had learned when to add little details and when to just have broad, uninterrupted spaces with only one color. In the end, these aspects of imitating real life changed my art for the better.

I am the most proud of my final still-life drawing. This is because I loathe making still-lives with every fiber of my being. Still-lives can be impressive or beautiful, but I personally believe the only value of the “bowl-and-fruit” or “random items” still-lives lies in educational purposes, and I did indeed learn. This taught me how to be precise, but more importantly it taught me how to take the time to be precise. Through working on it, I discovered a new measure of patience within me I never thought could have existed. It was almost therapeutic to slowly see so many parts of the unit come together there, especially shading. It was satisfying to see my spite-fueled work become complete, and I was glad I learned from it. I hated the process and never want to do it again, but now I have more patience for perfecting parts of my usual drawings, which are more fantastical. The hand-drawing activity is particularly helpful there, and I’m glad we spent time on that in class. Ultimately, though I utterly loathe making still-lives and would rather write a hundred more paragraphs with an acidic keyboard than draw another one, I do believe I learned the most from that experience and can utilize that information in art I actually want to do. I am very grateful that I got the opportunity to learn this.