1) Required question: A challenging but successful piece this year was my foreshortening piece. I chose to do the bananas in prisma for this piece because I knew it would be challenging, but in a way I could achieve a successful piece despite the challenge. Because this piece was done in colored pencil, I had to sketch out the piece a couple times to test colors together, and to get the shape convincing enough for the foreshortening effect. Blending prismas isn't incredibly difficult, but for the strange banana skin finish that I was trying to create, I had to take a lot more time to blend the pencils to create this effect. Creatively, I think the composition of this piece was the best, I had the bananas aligned in a way that carries your eyes across the piece. My artistic maturity I think is prominent in the simplicity of the piece, the focus of colors in the bananas is what draws the attention of someone looking, and the focus of the background isn't as prominent. This piece wasn't extrordinarily unique but the bright colors and bruising on the bananas has a capturing effect that I think really enhanced this piece. Overall I think this piece showed a lot of artistic improvement in this piece.
Optional Questions: 1) I believe my artistic style is deeply metaphorical when I am not drawing a clear image with no alterior motives. I enjoy taking a concept and a well known idea and meshing them together to create an inspiring art piece. I think success as an artist is making someone glance at your piece, and then look again, and then want to keep looking. I think keeping the attention of someone with your art is also one of the best compliments to your piece, whether they like the piece or not, it intrigued them. This kind of intrigue is one of the most rewarding things to see as an artist. A skill I think neccessary for any good art piece is inspiration, and the way it goes in and out of your piece. I think not being able to find a unique idea to form into art from whatever inspiration you’ve called upon is going to be difficult to make into a piece that will inspire others. This is also one of the most important things I’ve learned through art, that no idea is purely unique, but inspiring others to have a different take on your art is what art is all about.
Here is a piece I did in my free time, I took the well known idea of emotion, specifically sadness, and mixed it with something beautiful (a rose) to create something inspiring.
3) Some of the ways my portfolio doesn’t completely capture my experience in drawing class is what I’ve learned. Some of the skills I learned started from zero, so my final work in a subject may not represent how capable I can be in that medium. An example of this would be my scratch board project. I previously had never used scratch board before, so though I’m not entirely happy with what I’ve done, I think it’s a good piece considering my prior ignorance. Another example would be my portrait drawing, before this class I had drawn people but I’d never tried to fully shade my own face before. So the final for that piece doesn’t reflect my new understanding for portrait drawings currently.
This is the scratchboard project I think I needed to improve upon.
6) My favorite medium to work with was pencil and charcoal. I use blending as a crucial skill in my art pieces so the graphite of the pencils and charcoal blended well for me and were an enjoyable medium to work with. In the fabric piece that I did, this medium helped me to blend over the curves of the fabric and create convincing values with the darkness of the charcoal. Another technique I acquired using this medium is gradation. I think being able to erase the graphite helped me to understand how I can use this medium better. With bright highlights to the darkest possible shadows I find that this medium was generally the most successful for me.
This is my pencil and charcoal piece.
7) I think for this semester I was the least successful in the still life project. The composition, the values, and the execution were just not my best work, and I know if I did several things differently this piece could be a lot better. For example, I think I tried to include too many of the pieces of the still life, and so the composition looks overwhelmed and oddly placed. Also, because this piece has so many moving parts I think I became overwhelmed, and this shows in the haphazard and rushed shading throughout the piece. To fix this piece in the future, I would narrow down the objects to maybe 4 instead of 8-9 and then take my time shading and highlighting this piece.