Art 1 Final Portfolio

 

My favorite project this semester was the stencil. The stencil was something you would not do every day which is why I liked it so much. It is not a piece I could do in my garage at home without help or instructions. It allowed the use of newer skills that we had just learned and very new skills most of us did not have before. For example, we got to use Photoshop to start making the stencils and you could even change the colors. The easiest part of the project was tracing the stencil but it was still interesting to trace from a projector and tracing different colors. The stencil also incorporated the idea of complementary colors. Complementary colors are colors on the opposite end of the color wheel. If they are mixed they make brown. I felt the stencil was one of my most successful pieces because it was neat and well thought out which made it very professional looking. I was happy with the finished product and it is not every day that you get to use spray paint.

 The project that I learned and developed the most from was the contour line unit. Contour lines are lines that you draw without picking up your pencil until the shape is completed. The point of this type of drawing is to focus on the shape that you are drawing without using value. In this unit, we did blind contour drawings which is when you only look at your subject and don’t look at what is being drawn. For this part of the unit, we drew our own hands. I thought this was weird at first and the drawing was horrible. The next few times I did it, I realized that I was drawing over my lines again. This helped me to draw exactly what I saw and not what I thought it should look like. Another way to gain this skill is to draw upside down. Contour lines have helped me become a better artist and improved my drawing skills tremendously.

The clay tile piece used previous skills and techniques learned from other projects. We had learned skills like value, texture, focal points and complementary colors earlier in the semester while doing drawings and paintings. I think that it was important that we had to use these skills in 3D with the clay because it showed the importance of these techniques. You need to know about the texture to put in the clay as well as the value when you sculpt and paint it. Working with clay really ties it all together. Now, I will use more textures and details in drawings and paintings in the future. The clay tile piece would not have been very interesting if I had done it at the beginning of the semester. It would have been a totally different piece. I enjoyed seeing my improvement over the semester and how I have used the new skills.

The self portrait was the least important project and my least favorite drawing. It was a very difficult project to complete because it is hard to draw human faces. It is a lot of value and not a lot of lines. You basically have to shade the whole face. It is also really hard for me to draw my own face because it is hard not to draw what I want to see. We should have at least taken a picture so that our face was consistent from day to day. I feel that we could have displayed value in a different way. We could have done a sketch of an animal face, a reflective vase or fruit. All of these require you to use value but would not be as difficult. Painting your own face is a project that takes a lot more work and skill to do well but we only had a week and a half. I did learn some about value but it was frustrating. We should have done several value projects to ease us into it more.

The piece of artwork that I would chose to reflect myself as an artist would be the landscape painting. I have painted lots of things before but I had not tried a landscape. My favorite things to paint are dogs because I like to bring them to life when painting their eyes. I even like to paint pictures of actual pets that belong to my friends because it makes them have good memories about their dog or cat. When painting this landscape, it reflects me as an artist because it brings back great memories for me. I have a personal connection with this painting because I took this picture during a trip to California. I hope that other people who see the painting and have been to California will think of a memory they had there. Hopefully, it will provoke an emotion in them and make them happy. I also think this project reflects me as an artist because I like to travel and see things that make memories that last forever. Every time I see this painting, I will think of that trip.