Art 3 Final Reflection

5/20/24

Over the past year, I have learned a lot more about various art skills that have helped me grow as an artist. We have done many different projects and mediums which include a self-portrait, mixed media sculptures, oil painting, and abstract expressionism. All of these styles of art have helped me explore different mediums of paint and see what I enjoy and what I don’t like that much. An important aspect I have learned about art is that it takes patience and that mistakes are part of the process. When creating my self portrait, I remember that it was very frustrating to work with the kante crayon because I couldn’t get a very sharp edge, so I got a kante pencil for the sharp edges while using the kante crayon for the larger areas. I realized you have to problem solve and be patient. Additionally, when I was creating my abstract expressionism painting, I kept feeling like I was doing something wrong and I kept making mistakes, but I realized that it was ok to feel like you're making mistakes because that can help create something interesting and especially in painting, mistakes can get covered up. 

Looking at the past art skill inventories, I can tell that I have grown as an artist significantly. In the beginning of the year, I could tell my art skill inventories weren’t very good, but I thought my self-portrait wasn’t the worst. But after making our big self-portrait, I can see that I have improved. I have learned to be more precise in marks, be more proportionally correct, and how to use shading better. I think that I have seen the greatest improvement in my abstraction skills from the beginning of the year though. When I looked back at my art skill inventory for the abstract painting I was amazed by how bad it looked. Honestly, it looked like a 5 year old had drawn that. But, I have definitely seen improvement from that paper to the big canvas we just painted. I think that our abstract painting really shows the growth that everyone in class has had because it compares the art skill inventory we did at the beginning of the year to the last art 3 project of the year. My painting may not be the best non-objective abstract painting in the world, but it clearly shows growth from the inventory and I think that’s what is important. 

I think that I need to improve in figure drawing and self-portraits. I am not very good at drawing the human figure proportionally correct because it always looks boxy or the head will be too big compared to the body or vice versa. Similarly, when I draw just faces, the eyes are off, or the lips are too small or some part of the face is off. I want to improve my skills in drawing to be able to improve my figure drawing and self-portrait skills because I think it is very fun to draw people and faces. I like drawing more realistic things like still lifes, so I want to be able to accurately draw a realistic face or human figure. Additionally, I would like to improve my skills in using my creativity to create art. I tend to rely on a reference picture to draw for fun which is fine, but I want to learn to just use my brain and come up with ideas that I can draw. I want to try to improve that by just doodling random stuff that comes to my head.

Next year as I move forward with my independent work, I want to use all my previous knowledge as well as all the skills I learned this year to create meaningful work. All the art 3 projects have taught me more skills regarding drawing, with the self-portrait, and painting, with the oil and abstract paintings. I want to mainly work with drawing and painting so these were really important projects for me to grow. Additionally, I am going to use my ideas from head and heart projects to influence my summer assignment and next year's work. I am going to use all my skills and create pieces that hopefully will incorporate my common themes of nature and self-identity. I love using various aspects of nature, especially flowers, to show the beauty of nature as well as the degrading aspects of nature. I want to incorporate this with self-identity and the hidden qualities we keep from others. Hopefully, I can use these ideas and create art that I love next year!