Art 1 Finale Portfolio

1.    Which project was your favorite or most successful this semester?

           The landscape painting was my favorite and most successful project this semester, because we finally got to take out the paint and have fun. I feel that with paints you have more color and you can do more with it than a pencil. With a pencil you are stuck shading everything, so you never really get the true colors to come out and pop. With paints not only can you get different shades but you can have different colors to go along with the shading. Also with the paints you get to have more of the 3-D type feel to the picture/painting that you would not have otherwise had with a pencil. With a paintbrush you can dab the surface or you can make the surface smooth, and rough it up when nedded so it gives you more of the texture that you would not have had before. Also when you have colors to work with, each thing you draw/paint looks better because the colors can compliment each other to make one object stand out more than the other. The last thing that made this project the most exiting was the paint, paint is fun and free and you can do anything with it. Which is why the landscape painting was the most fun project of the semester.

2.    Regardless of whether you liked or disliked a project, which one did you learn, grow, or developed the most from? 

           The project that I learned the most from would have to have been the clay tile project with the animals. It was the most difficult project we had done all semester, because of all the steps to it, if you messed up one your whole project could have been ruined. The hardest part was sculpting the clay because you had a time frame that you needed to mold it without drying it out. If you dried it out then it started to crack and you had to start over. You had to have patients to do this because you can not rush sculpting or it would come out not looking like you wanted. Once everything was done being shaped we had to paint it, which was even more difficult because you were trying to completely paint everything, without going over into the next object. You had to be very detailed in the project, and carefully think about what you were going to do next. But, by the end of the project everything you had to do paid off, when you got to see what the final piece would look like.

3.    Choose 1 piece of Art that you used skills and techniques learned from previous projects?

           The project that most used skills that we had used before was the stencil project. The stencil project used many different skills we had learned in art through the semester, such as the step that when had to go on Photoshop. On Photoshop we had to edit the image so that we could trace it and eventually spray paint it. I had used Photoshop in other classes as well as art this year to get an idea of what the art would look like when I was done with it. The hardest part was the tracing, which we had plenty of practice with in the first week when we did all of the drawing exercising. They paid off for this project, because if you traced it wrong then you picture would end up not looking like the person. Then when we had to use the Exacto knife to cut out the paper I knew what to expect from previous art classes so I found that step pretty easy where other people struggled to cut out all the shapes. The best part that we did in this project was actually spray painting the cardboard. This was the part I had no experience with, after we did the first few layers though you started to get good at it and learned the best ways to use the paint. 

4.    Which project do you feel was the least important in learning the concepts taught in this course? 

           The project this semester that I found the least important would be the cartoon skeleton drawing that we did. It was at the very beginning of the semester that we did these and I feel that we never used any of the skills learned in this project on other projects. With most other projects we did, the projects built off each other to keep developing skills until the final project where you could display all the skills you had learned. Such as the spray painting piece that we did, we used other skills such as the cardboard tracing, and the attention to detail. This project however, we never built off of it. We never used anything else with bones or people, nor with animals. I feel like it was just a simple project that we never really used; it was also boring because we could not add color. All we had to use was a pencil to try to achieve as much detail as we could. When it came down to the small bones and the face it was hard to make it look like the character without color. Most people can distinguish a character from a television show one of two ways, the first is shape and the second is color, but we only got to use one of those ways. The last thing would be that we never had anything to base it off of, we had to completely come up with the shape of everything alone.

5.   Choose a piece or artwork where the subject matter reflects you as an artist. One that you have a personal connection to? 

          The piece of artwork that reflects me as an artist the most would be the print making project we did. With the print making project we got to choose everything, the choice was ours for what animal we did, what the surroundings looked like; everything down to the color of the paper and ink. This was the project that we got to personalize the most, with the detail, to the depth of the cut we made into the linoleum. I chose the fish and sea because I love going to the lake or ocean; when your at the beach nothing can bother you, no distractions. You can't help but be relaxed which is why I chose it, I thought it would be fun to get the detail of the rocks and the grass around the fish. After that part the unique thing about print making is no two prints will be the same. You can't make them look the same, so it is not til you peel back the linoleum, that you find out what it will look like. The part that it reflects about me the most is this sea, rocks, and grass part of the print. I have always liked the ocean and wondered how it would work to paint or draw something that was underwater and it is one of my favorite things to draw. You don't really have a picture in your head all ready of what you think it would look like; with that you pay more attention to the detail of the fish and the background and it ends up looking more like the picture you were using.