Reflecting on my goals for the semester

My biggest goal that I wanted to achieve taking this class was to be able to draw more realistic face portraits, and I think I was definetely able to pinpoint this goal in this class. Drawing the portrait of myself was not only helpful in drawing and shading more realistically, but also helped me understand my face features and the basic features and proportions of the human face. I think starting with a self portrait when on a journey to draw more realistic portraits in the future is a great way to start, since you know your face the best, and you can then connect it to other portraits and different faces. I think the area I showed most improvement in that I struggled in before was drawing mouths and making the shape and shading correct. I always had trouble with drawing these and finding the right way to shade them to be the most realistic. Same with drawing and shading noses; I used to draw an outline of a nose on my portrait, but learned the best way to blend it in with the rest of the face and reach a 3d look was to use shading to bring out the shape, while only drawing the bottom part of the nose for detail. I also learned how to find the lights of a drawing, and starting light with pencil when Im figuring out where to shade, avoiding any problems with erasing in the future and making sure the shading is correct. Something I also want to advise that I learned this year was how to draw hair. I struggled a lot with drawing hair, not knowing whether to make it super disconnected and flowy, with lots of wispy pieces and lines that don't connect to the full head of hair and bring out detail.

I think being an artist means that you are easily inspired by anything and have a passion to create your own interpretations of different things, no matter how much talent you have. If you are easily motivated to draw and create and you can connect your other hobbies to your art as your inspiration then I think you are an artist. I consider myself to be an artist because I am heavily inspired by nature and by things I see, even movies I watch that I immediately am motivated to recreate parts of and have my own interpretations of them to have my own art style and to channel my creativity into things I love.