Art 2 Portfolio

Art 2 Final Portfolio

1. The project I felt was most successful was my mixed media piece. The theme for my project personally was imagination, a subcategory of the main prompt, amusement. I really enjoyed the creation of this, using water colors and oil pastels. These choices really went well together; even though the water colors were not pure water, the pastels still repelled them making any mistakes while paint not that big of a deal. The way I painted the piece made the texture of the swirl of imagination look silky. I put on the pastel before painting and having never used the water color paint in a long time, I was amazed at how the layers came out. I outlined the figures in the artwork in pencil before going over them, in the pastel. With the pastel done, I finished up the work by adding in the paint. I contrasted the bright colors of the imagination bubble with the gray color of the "real world" making the focus point the swirl. When this project was finished, I felt it looked very nice and flowed together in harmony and it became my favorite one out of all the projects we did this semester.

2. I definitely felt that our last project, the book art, was the project in which I overcame the most obstacles. The project was much more difficult than the rest because it involved the carving of layers into a book. Books are not a single flat surface but consist of many different thin pages, making the carving extremely different. I had to go over the cuts over and over again to make them seem somewhat likable and even then I was not 100 percent satisfied with the carving. However, even when I did mess up the carving, I went back over it, removing the page if necessary, and in the end the book turned out presentable. Another issue was the fact that when the carving was done, the pages would no longer stay down when left open. This led to my applying Gesso to the outside of the page, and I almost ended up gluing the book shut. During the final stages of the creation, I painted the layers with acrylic paint. The shirt had the silky look to it like the mixed media which I was very happy with, and the background came out quite nicely, sending the message, "Is this supposed to be a sad picture, because of the crying and dull background, or is it supposed to be upbeat because the person is smiling?" I felt that the cool colors of the shirt and background flow quite nicely with the warm skin color, making this picture look nice. When everything was dry, the piece had come together, the different parts of the picture standing out thanks to the contrasts of the colors and the way everything was "layered".

3. I feel that these two pieces portray my growth as an artist. The first piece was completed toward the beginning of the semester for the prompt "Up Close and Personal", the second, "Sticky Situation". The first was created with oil pastel and is a drawing of a match. Here, I tried to blend together the colors of the pastels and make the texture of the match look like actual wood. The bright colors provided for some nice contrast with the dark background. I used a circle technique when shading the match head which gave the feel of a spherical object, which I was quite proud of even if the piece was not the best. I learned the importance of contrast and got a feel for different techniques when adding color to artwork. The second piece is of a spiderweb, created with acrylic paint on a canvas.  I really enjoyed this piece and I learned the importance of colors feeding into one another. I textured the trees with many different colors of brown giving them sort of a rich, wrinkled look, which I really liked. However, though I thought the trees looked good, I wasn't fully satisfied with the waves.  The waves are supposed to look like actual waves or at least good enough so that the viewer can tell it's water they are looking at. That did not come out as planned because I ran out of the blue color I had thought I had enough of. I was not able to recreated the color, leading to the waves looking like shadows on whatever background the viewer came up with. Nonetheless, I learned how important it is for the technique to be spot on to avoid messing up and in turn, running out of paint. I was also able to be creative with these pieces, adding string to the spiderweb making it one, 3D, and two, making the web itself stand out, adding my own special touch to the work. Throughout the duration of this course, I found that I liked my art to be very "loud" using more warm colors than cool. I also learned when to trust my instinct when I made a mistake or something unexpected happened; I went with the flow and more times than not, it led to the artwork having a different, but better, feel to it, such as when the paint turned out silky in my mixed media (see question 1). I enjoyed the process of becoming better at art very much, and look forward to learning more in the future.

4. This new way of teaching was definitely fun, and I enjoyed being able to pick my own media and what it was I made my artwork of. It was effective in helping to create some pieces, but in others, such as this piece from the "Uncommon Media", were difficult to create. The fact that we were able to choose what we created as long as it was within the boundaries of the assignment was definitely fun, as we got to let our imaginations flow. For this project, I made my girlfriend out of duct tape. However, for this project, picking our own media was something that came to bite me in the butt. I thought that duct tape was going to be fun and easy. Maybe it was fun but it definitely was not easy. The duct tape did not always want to do what I wanted it to do and in many cases, it would stick to itself and was very hard to make things that did not look boxy. The image itself was not very good and in some parts looked plain awful, such as the nose outline and hair. In other projects, the media that we used we had been given instructions on how to go about using them, and even more, a choice as to which of the media provided we could use. For this project, the media I used did not come with a set of instruction which proved to be a hindrance and it ultimately led to this project not coming up to par. In other projects this new way of learning worked quite well but unfortunately, for this one, it did not.