Reflecting at the end of the course.

When we started art class this year i was really excited. Art has always been something that i have loved to do. Although i haven't really been the completely and totally thrilled with everything i have done or made in this class i have, on some level, enjoyed doing it all. Some of the projects and things we did that i remember most were the figure drawings, print making and sculpting. Those were some of the projects that i enjoyed working on the most our of everything. There are also plenty of non-art related memories that i have that just happened in this space, but they were all mostly great nonetheless. I'm hoping that art will continue to be a big part of my life though out the whole thing. I think the techniques, ideas and skills that i have learned in this class will really help me with whatever i do in art in the future. Also just in life learning about the principles of design kind of gives you a new way of looking at the world. It kind of makes everything seem a little more beautiful even if it is something simple you can relate it back to art. I think that everything i learned in this class will prove to be valuable information through out the rest of my life.

I See the Light Drawing

My goal of using the dark and the light in my picture was to emphasize the woman and have sort of a positive glow coming down on her. This idea was inspired by my aunt who introduced me to art and showed me how much i really loved it. She passed away kind of recently and i guess in a way this is her. I'm not really sure if she is supposed to be the woman sitting or if she is the light, but i know that this drawing is of her and what she means to me. I used the pencils to darken out the corners of the drawing that had nothing going on in them and used the eraser to take out darkness from the cloud and the light that is coming out of it. I also used to pencil to make a dark shadow coming from the woman to further show that the light is shining down on her. I discovered that working with pencil is much more difficult then i would have thought, it gets a lot messier then you would think. Its also very difficult to get the shading from very dark to very light to be coherent and look right. I realized that i don't particularly like working with only pencils and erasers but i don't particularly dislike it either.

Self Portrait as a Panda in a Bumper Car

I choose a panda because they are quite, seem to be shy and kinda appear lazy most of the time. I put the panda in a bumper car because bumper cars are usually bright, loud and draw lots of attention. Those two things seem to contradict each other and at times so does my personality.

My experiences using clay in the past has mostly just been making coil pots and playing around in middle school art, never a real sculpture. Since we painted out projects only one color i had to really think about the textures i would have to make to show the different parts of fur on the panda and the different parts of the bumper car. I didn't have much of a problem with the structure of my sculpture because i was able to build both thing separately and then attach them to each other.

Me-scape: A Reductive Block Print

The process of figuring out a design for the print wasn't very hard, the actual printing was much harder. The easiest part of the printing was figuring out what needed to be carved out first and the carving itself. The most difficult part was keeping all the materials clean and lining up the print with the paper in the same place every time. If i was going to do this again i would make sure to clean everything more as to keep my paper clean and try and line up the print more exactly.

thinking about the use of light in art

light can be used in many different ways to show many things. in a spiritual way like when light is used in a painting and is like shining down on a person it usually represents heaven, a higher power or to be more vague just the "good" in general. there is also the more angry and fueling light like the light of fire shows that to me sometimes. there is also the more man made light which to me usually shows a person trying to be the center of attention or get praise. what comes to mind when i think of that is stage lights or even just lights in a household, you turn one on so you can see and focus better on a certain thing or object making it the center of attention. i feel like in all paintings and works of art the same kind of light can be interpreted in different ways by different people.