Art 1 Final Portfolio

1. My favourite project, besides my landscape painting, was the Stencil Portrait. This was because of many reasons. First of all, I was able to work with tools, such as the blades which were used to cut the thick posterboard.  This helped me later on, as I used tools with my painting and clay tile. It also allowed me to take a picture and divide it into smaller shapes. I had already done this on my Print. Finally, I helped me to greater apreciate the process work and learn more pateince. The entire project was done in steps. This helped me to have a better result than I would normally have had. It also, in effect, helped me on later projects.

2. I believe the project that I learned and grew the most from was my Contour Show Drawing. This helped me to realize that drawing from what is in an artist's head is ussually not as accurate as drawing from a visual scource. This helped me later in my further projects. With almost every project I did this semester I had to employ this. Taking in a visual information and then transferring it to a canvas or sheet helped me quite a bit. I believe I employed this msot, however, when I was working on my self portrait. Though I am ussually quite good ay drawing more cartoonish versions of myself while doodling, actually looking at my self in the mirror helped me very much. I was able to capture many small details, such as my eye shape and the individual curls in my hair, by veiwing myself. In all, the Contour Show Drawings, tough a realatively early endevour, helped me throughout the semester in many more ways than I could ever have deduced or anticipated.

3. I believe that the project that I used past skills on the msot was my Print.  This is because of many reasons. For one thing, when I was doing the print, I had to cut into solid linolium. This meant that, like my contour shoe drawing, I couldnt go back over my mistakes and had to be very meticulous. This was escpecially hard in making the individual stripes. The spaces were so tight that it was very easy to make a mistake and ruin the whole project. I also, like my Cartoon Skeleton drawing, had to make sure I drew in and so then carved out all the individual shapes. This was escpecially important with my print, as the result was a picture made entirely of individual shapes. 

4. I believe that the least important project that we did this semester were the clay tiles. Though they may have been fun to most of the students I do not believe they contributed much to learning art. The only contribution they had was an introduction to working with clay and sculpting. I believe that learning sculpting is fine as a precursor to further sculpting projects in other art classes but do not see why teaching it now in Art 1 was validated. It did not connect to any of the other lessons we had, such as landscapes and shapes. Other than an intro to sculpting, the clay tiles also helped us to realize drawings in a three-dimensional perspective. Still, I believe that sculpting an object on its own would have been better. The clay tiles were mostly taking shapes, slapping them onto a flat piece of clay, and shaping them into our drawings. So, in other words, they weren't really realizing objects in three dimensions but more taking a picture and making it pop off of the background.

5. I believe the only piece of artwork that I have really had any sort of connection to was my painting. I made it of a London skyline for many reasons. Since I was a child I have had a major fascination with England. I have wanted to move there the majority of my life and am trying to see if I can get into an exchange student program to go to a university there. Painting a London skyline simply helped me to have more  of an interest in the project. Because of I was interested and engaged, being the person I am, allowed me to notice every single miniscule detail and try my best to convert it to a painting. This included the meticulous blending of certain paints and colours to create the right shade of brown for the Houses of Parliament as well as the correct blend of blue and grey for the Thames river. In all, I believe I did my best on this project because i\I was interested in the subject.

Linoleum Print

This project was more of  challenge. This was mainly becuase of the outright tediousness of it. The simple part was just taking a picture of an animal, drawing it, and then transferring it to linoleum. Then i had to painstakingly carve out all the white areas that show up now so that the raised pareas would catch the ink. For the most part, however, I feel that the result was what I was expecting.

Photshop 2

For this project I had to, again, use photshop. This one was slightly more challenging because it used tools i normaly dont utilize. However, for the most part I understood it.

Photoshop 1

For this I had to follow a video's instructions on how to use photshop to make an image like this. The video was easy to follow, and as I laready know how to work photoshop I found the assignment easy.

Stencil

For this porject I had to fist choose a photo. I then took the photo and edited it in Photoshop, making it into individual shapes. I then projected it onto a peice of poster board and traced all the shapes. Then I too the peices of poster board and cut out the shapes. This was probubly the hardest part, as the tools I had to get the poster board with were not very good at making small turns and details. I then took a peice of cardboard and painted my background color onto it. I took my stencils outside, along with the sparypaint and peice of cardoard. I lined the stencils up to the cardboard and sparyed paint on them. This created individual colored shapes on the peice of carboard. I put the the other stencils on and repeated the process, and eventually my original picture formed out of the lined up shapes. This project, due mainly to weather, was quite hard to do. However, I was happy with how my work turned out.

Contour Shoe

With this peice of artwork I had to never lift my pencil from my paper. I found this difficult in some areas. However, for the move part it helped me to perceive the shapes and lines that I was drawing better. The hardest part was drawing the areas of high detail, particularily the shoes laces.

IPAD Value

In doing this project, I beleive that making the value studies on the Ipad was much easier than with oil pastels. When technology does much of the work for you, and without a mess, you tend to have a bias towards it. Still, the actual motion of swishing the colors together nad over each other was more or less the same. I beleive that technology in art is incredibly useful. For example, you cant change the contrast and hue of  a picture with a pencil and paint, unless your somekind of sorcerer, but in a program like Photoshop you can with the click of a mouse.

Cartoon Skeleton

With this peice of artwork I had to take the charcters basic shape and at a skeleton to it, using realistic yet exggerated bones to fit the style. Having to do this, I made the skull shaped so that it fit the charcter's head, and made the legs made of many small vertebrae-like bones, as the charcter is a squid and his legs are flexible (Although real cephelepods are boneless). I added nomral lungs and arms, but made his hands out of multiple interlocking bones so that they, like the legs, were flexible. I feel that, for one of my first art projects, I did well.