I find it really sad that this will be my final art blog for Art 1. I have to say, I learned so much in this class. If you had asked me what we would be doing in Art at the start of the semester I probably would have said something like "painting or drawing? Maybe sculpture?" Actually I did think I would learn a lot in Art 1, but I didn't know how much. One thing that changed a lot for me was how realistic my drawing was. I thought that I was pretty good at drawing eyes, but then I drew a real human being's eye. Wow. The difference is kind of insane. I find the differences between two eyes amazing. The one on the left is so unrealistic, strangely shaped, and the eyebrow is about half of the length of the eye. Yikes. The eye on the right kind of shocks me. I still can't believe I was able to do that! Besides the fact that it was more realistic, it also shows a growth in how I actually create artwork. I hardly ever use colored pencil before this class. I got some Prismacolors for christmas and I just HAD to draw something with them. (I mean they are Prismacolors!) I found a picture of an eye online and drew it, and it is basically my greatest achievement. In the Observe unit I had a very important lesson in perspective. I had done a perspective drawing in seventh grade art, but I had no idea what I was doing. When we were told to sit in the hall and draw what we saw I was totally and completely lost. I did my best, but the result is super embarrassing. Can we just look at the "before" picture for a minute. The walls look like they're going to fall over (the right wall looks like it already did...) and what kind of perspective is that? I feel like I am looking down on the hallway and it is making me very uncomfortable. The picture on the right is better in so many ways. Although I never finished shading, it is way more real. I feel like I am walking through a real hallway, not to mention ones with upright walls. I think that I definitely learned the most in the Artist's Observe unit, and these pictures are proof. For the Final project the theme I had to portray was beauty. My first piece was a rose, which is really "basic" as my teacher would say. The rose was also in the center of the page (basic composition), and there were strange looking tentacles with thorns all around it. Im not really sure what I was trying to portray, but for the beginning of the course it wasn't bad. My new art is a huge improvement. I wanted to have a deeper meaning than the first one I drew of "beauty." I decided to show an example of how people view beauty in today's society, and also how much words can affect a person's body image. I think that it was a much better interpretation of the theme, and it also was a much more high quality drawing. I am super proud of how it turned out. I think that my favorite unit to do was Artists Steal. I thought that it was really cool to change an idea that was already thought of and make it your own. I also learned that stealing is not a crime in the art world. I "stole" the idea of Disney princesses for my project but I changed them into my own artwork. I really enjoyed seeing how I could take two ideas or things and combine them together. My favorite piece that I made in this class was done in this unit, for the "2 to 1" project. In fact, another piece I love was done in the Artist Steal unit, with the subject steal project. I loved taking Art1. I loved seeing my art skills improve, and they improved a LOT. I also had a ton of fun in the class, whatever we did. I liked how the projects were open to our own interpretation so we could express ourselves in different ways. I also learned ways to create art that I had never tried before. One of those was the lino cut. I had seen my sister do one before, but I never did one in any of my previous classes. Art 1 gave me many opportunities to experiment with different medias of art. I honestly think that I learned a lot, and nothing could really be different. Ms. Purtee made the class so enjoyable and she taught me so much about art. I can't wait to see what the rest of high school art will bring.
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When we first got the identity project, I was totally overthinking it. I was trying to find something that really described me, but it was like I tried a little too hard. I went through my ideas, and I found one I really liked. Gender Stereotypes. I liked this idea because it is actually something I have learned a lot about in the last year. When my older sister went to college she learned all kinds of things about feminism and sexism. She comes home and talks to me about everything she learns and I find it really interesting. I decided to look on Pinterest and find some quotes that represent sexism for both men and women to put in my artwork. There were the generic "Girls like pink," or "boys can't show weakness" quotes, but there were also some really deep ones. I got a picture of me from behind in b&w (because it's super artsy!) and put the quotes all around it. It turned out really awesome if I do say so myself.
For the Teens, Inspired project I had a really tough time finding a piece that really inspired me. I kept on looking and looking, but I just couldn't find the right piece. My art teacher showed me this piece called "The Blue Dancer" and I really liked it. Since I am a dancer, the piece inspired me to paint something dance related. This is the final work! I liked that the dancer didn't see her face, because it has a deeper meaning than if it had been a perfect reflection. I chose the "Blue Dancer" by Alexander Archipenko because it was dance themed, and I am a dancer. It inspired me to try to make a dance themed artwork, which I had only tried once before. I was really inspired by the motions that the sculpture was making, and I especially liked that it looked peaceful even in the odd positions. I took that idea of peace and put it into my art. Im really happy with how it turned out, and I am very thankful that my art teacher showed me "The Blue Dancer" because without that inspiration, who knows what i would have done! For sculpture week we were taught all of the basics of clay and linoleum. I chose to do a project out of clay, and I used the pinch pot technique. I never knew that pinch pots could be used to make sculptures, but this unit taught me that you can! The steps are really simple, and made it easy for me to make my sculpture. The first step in creating a pinch pot is to wedge your clay. This is a step similar to kneading bread. Wedging is SUPER important, because it takes the air bubbles out of the clay. Make sure you use water to keep your clay pliable. If you touch the clay too much without adding water it will start to crack. My pinch pot sculpture was inspired by Christmas and a classic holiday movie, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer! I made the body a pinch pot and then added features to make my very own Rudolph! This unit was all about overcoming obstacles, and not letting limitations stop our art. If you asked me a few weeks ago if I would ever consider making art without my hands, I would have said something like "why would I do that?" However, as this unit progressed, I learned that you can make some really cool artwork when you are limited. For example, I was part of a group project where we could not touch the canvas. We decided to splatter, which doesn't seem like it would be hard, but it was. So we went to the arting patio with paint & canvas in hand, and started splattering. The final product was very pleasing. Our sunset turned out really nice, and we hadn't even touched the canvas.I love how the colors blended together and how the black mountains contrast the sunset. When we were making this, we actually ran into an unexpected obstacle: we were out of black paint! I had to mix red, blue, and yellow (primary colors) to make my own black paint. It was actually really cool to see the colors change to black. In our second unit, "Artists Steal", we learned about creating original art by "stealing" ideas. When I began this unit, I thought that stealing ideas was totally wrong, and that I could get in some serious trouble for doing it. Turns out, you can steal ideas, but there's a catch. You have to change something about the idea, make it your own. for our first project, we did something called a character remix. We took ideas from a movie or character, and we changed something about them. I decided I would change Ariel and Giselle (from Disney) and make them look more modern day. I had so much fun doing this project. I also got to try something new, and paint my artwork! I really love the way this turned out, and I was really excited about how I was able to combine Disney princesses and modern day fashion. I also love how the yellow background brings out the color of the shirts, especially the purple (they are complements of course). All in all, I learned that you can "steal" an idea, but change it and make it completely original! The second project we did was probably my favorite. We were given the task to take two objects, and combine them to make them totally different. At first I was stuck. What two things can be merged, and still look cool? I knew I wanted to do something with dance (since I'm a dancer), but I couldn't think of what to combine. Then it hit me. I decided to combine pointe shoes with broken porcelain, to represent the beauty of dance, but also the pain. I also wanted to make this a simple graphite drawing, and I focused on the value a lot to give it a more dark mood. I especially like the way the value looks on the ribbons, it made them look really realistic. Our third and final project was called subject steal, and we had to take ideas from a subject we had learned in school, and incorporate it into our artwork. I knew i wanted to do something related to science and nature, so off to Pinterest I went, searching for ideas. I found the perfect idea, but I didn't want to copy it. It was a tree silhouette with birds flying at the top. I loved the idea of doing a tree, and instead of birds, I did falling leaves to represent the season Autumn. As for the artwork, I tried something new, a linoleum cut. I really enjoyed the whole process of the lino cut, although the actual printing was very tedious. I chose to do the colors orange and brown to show the theme of Autumn. I also had to look at pictures of real trees to see how the branches look, and get a real idea of what to draw. Hate to break it to you, but trees don't really look like clouds on a stick. The Artists Steal unit really taught me a lot about original art, and i was really surprised to find that stealing isn't as bad as we all think, as long as we make the idea our own. So don't copy a piece of art you see online, thinking that no one will see it. Take that artwork as an inspiration, and make it your own. Our first unit, Artists Observe was all about observational drawing. Our first assignment was to pick any object in the room and draw it. Mine was very basic, what my teacher calls "lame" composition. Below you can see the before and after of my observational drawing. A lot changed from the first drawing to the second. First, the composition was much better. My first drawing was just kind of floating in the center, but adding a horizon line and another bottle in the background totally changed the way the picture looks. Another thing that I improved was the value and line quality. Everything was sort of the same color in the first drawing, but there were different tones and highlights in the second that made it much more realistic. In the first drawing I did, the elipses weren't quite lined up, and they were kind of on an angle. Lining them up in the second drawing really helped to make the proportions better. Something else i learned about in the artists observe unit was perspective. As the first lesson, we went into the hallway and drew what we saw. It was pretty bad. I knew nothing about vanishing points, or how everything gets smaller as it gets farther away. After we learned about perspective drawing, my perspective changed (see what I did there?) The hallway looked more 3D and everything was going to the same point on the drawing. It was a HUGE improvement. Our final project for this unit was to create one more observational drawing. We had three choices of drawings: still life, scientific drawing, or perspective drawing. I chose a still life drawing, but the hardest part for me was trying to find an object that told a story about me. Eventually I chose a mug with a teabag, because I love to drink tea in the fall time (which is my favorite season. In the final drawing, my main focus was value and line weight. The range of values made the mug and spoon look three dimensional. The different weights in line also affect how 3D the object looks, but also made the drawing look more polished. The artists observe unit taught me SO much about drawing, and made me a much better artist. I feel like it will be much easier for me to draw new things now, and I can't wait to see what else this semester will bring!
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The BEGINNING.Here it is. The deepest, darkest depths of my high school art career. This was before I had any clue what I was doing, and marks the beginning of my journey as an artist. As a fun game, feel free to look through and then go back to my most recent art. You know, to see development and all of that. Enjoy the very beginning of my art education. Archives
January 2015
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