1. How do you describe your artistic style/perspective? How do you define success as an artist? What do you find most rewarding about being an artist? What are some of the most important skills you draw upon to create your work? What are some of the most significant things you've learned through art-making? I would describe my artistic style as a mix of both realistic and nonrealistic elements. I like to make my work colorful but at the same time maintain a minimalistic look. What I find most rewarding about art is the serenity I get from creating a piece. I find creating artwork to be a very calming task. I also love the accomplished feeling I get after finishing a piece. I think that the most important skill I have to rely upon is patience. Oftentimes when I am working on a piece, I will not be happy with how it is turning out. I have found that having patience until the end makes the process more worthwhile as I will usually be more satisfied once the piece is finished. For example, when I was creating my painting for the Landscape Inspired by a Famous Artist assignment, I was quite unsure with the direction my piece was headed in when I first began the project. Initially, this was a little bit frustrating, but I decided to have some patience and wait to make judgments on the piece until I had finished it entirely. This helped me a lot because it allowed me to move forward with my piece and just trust the process of painting. In the end, even though I felt that my piece wasn’t as representative of the artist I had chosen to base it off of, I was still satisfied with the work I had done.
2. Choose 2 mini lessons that you felt were the most beneficial in your learning for that particular project. Include photos of these and explain thoroughly. Do you feel you need more instruction for success? Explain or did you feel that the instruction given was enough to ensure success? Explain. The two mini lessons that I feel were the most beneficial in my learning this semester were the color pencil practice forms and the creative color wheel. Both of these lessons were crucial for giving me a better understanding of how to properly use both acrylic paint and colored pencils as medians in my pieces. For the colored pencil forms, I was instructed to draw cones and spheres, all with different colors and drawn on different colors of paper. These assignments gave me the opportunity to experiment with color pencil techniques and figure out how to properly blend colored pencils to create different levels of value. This helped immensely with my final color pencil sketch, where I drew a green apple, as I then knew more about how to use color pencils to make a piece look more seamless and realistic. For the creative color wheel assignment, I was instructed to create two color wheels; one using primary colors with a cooler undertone, and the other using primary colors with a warmer undertone. This assignment helped me understand how to create the perfect color for any piece. I learned how using small portions of drastically different colors can help create blanched shades and tones that I could use to make my piece more realistic. I think that the instruction I was given for these assignments were very helpful and ended up being very beneficial for setting me up for success in the course, and in my future pieces.
3. What medium was your favorite to work with? Explain why and how you were able to master the techniques associated with this medium. My favorite medium to work with was paint. I really enjoyed working with paint because I found that it was the most versatile medium. I also really liked how forgiving it is as if I made a mistake, I could always touch it up by adding more paint. I was able to learn how to properly mix colors and I think I was able to master that technique. I found this to be an extremely helpful tool as whenever I ran out of a certain color, I could mix together another batch of it by combining the right ratio of each primary color. I also learned that less is more when it comes to creating your piece. Blending and layering small amounts of paint into the canvas allowed me to create a more seamless and cohesive piece rather than using larger amounts and ending up with very distinct lines and shapes. During the second half of the semester I really got to get a feel for how to use paint and I realized that I actually really enjoyed using it. I will definitely apply the techniques that I learned to my future paintings.
4. Discuss one project where you felt you were the least successful. Explain why you felt this way. What would you do differently to change this piece? Explain. A project where I felt the least successful was the pen and perspective project. For this piece I wanted to create the illusion that a mermaid was swimming out of a shell under the sea. I liked the concept of my piece which was inspired by The Little Mermaid, however I feel that my execution of my plan could have been much better. I feel like the layout of my piece could have been planned a little more precisely. I really like the placement of the shell and the city of Atlantis but I feel that there is too much background space that when filled in with the various patterns, ends up taking away from the main focus of the piece. I think that if I were to redo this piece, I would definitely alter the proportions of each element and possibly change the orientation of my paper to better fit the layout of the elements. Additionally, I would take more time to create the mermaid, which is one of the main focuses of the piece. I think that adding more detail to the mermaid would definitely make the piece more appealing visually. Overall, even though I was not completely satisfied with the outcome of this piece, I think that it helped me understand my ability to create value and perspective using pen and ink mediums.