How do you describe your artistic style/perspective? How do you define success as an artist? What do you find most rewarding about being an artist? What are some of the most important skills you draw upon to create your work? What are some of the most significant things you've learned through art-making?
My artistic style is realistic, detailed, and usually with with smooth,short, broad brush strokes. I have a tendency to stick to bright often warm colors schemes. As an artist success is characterized by improvement and learning from your experiences working with different mediums. Creating something using your own creativity and being feeling accomplished/proud of it also adds to being successful. It is rewarding because you learn with every piece you make. You can visualize something and create that same thing from scratch for others to see as well. Important skills I use in my work are planning and sketching. I find it important to perfect placement and decide if I like the way my sketch looks prior to working on the painting. Patience especially with color mixing is an important skill. You can't be afraid of messing up the painting or worry about the outcome. Only planning and correcting your work as it goes on, then later learning from it for future works. Significant thing I learned is to find ways to manipulate your medium, to create an effect. One example is scratching away the waxiness of the colored pencil to reach other colors. Learning different techniques and ways to work and create your own art can be greatly benefited by practicing with different mediums. I think these year putting a large focus on watercolor and colored pencil I was able to learn more about them for them to improve in my pieces.
Look at your body of work over the semester and choose 2 pieces that show your growth as an artist. Discuss each piece and how you grew in the following areas: application of materials, techniques and skills, artistic vision, use of the principles and elements, creativity, intuition and subject matter.
The two pieces that show my growth as an artist are my final and watercolor artichokes painting. Before painting the artichokes I struggled with watercolor. I always tore the paper and didn't have control over the paint colors. In this painting I learned how to let the watercolor flow and layer it up. I could work with altering the opacity. I also mixed colors to have the right outcome. I also used colors for each section that were warm, cool, or complimentary and looked good next to each other. Which is an important skill to me, which could benefit me in future works. For my William Blake inspired painting, I improved in acrylic. I became better in using different resources for example damaged brushes and watered down paints to create texture with the acrylic. I needed the acrylic to look like watercolor and was successfully able to do so. I also feel as though the painting turned out the way I envisioned. Most of the ideas for the painting were from landscaped I remember seeing. I also improved with creating the perception of depth and perspective in my terraces. Stippling also benefited me when working on this painting, especially with the sheep and grainy look. Mixing and mimicking colors from the colored pencil unit was helpful when trying to create colors similar to William Blake's colors.
What medium was your favorite to work with? Explain why and how you were able to master the techniques associated with this medium.
My favorite medium to work with was watercolor. I enjoyed learning to layer the colors and work with translucent and opaque color. I was able to master these techniques with my watercolor artichokes and value chart. I put some more time into working with watercolor and used more water than I usually would, I used to always use more paint than water. Working with artichokes,I just layered with more water than paint and enjoyed the texture and look of the outcome. I like how I mixed colors by adding them on top of each other when the previous dried and adding a gradient wash. I also liked making the artichokes look more realistic using the watercolor pencils where I could create more detail and then blend using water. I had never used water color in this way before. When I had time between projects I worked on gradients and washes on separate papers. It was interesting to find how to move the colors and the affect adding water and other colors had on the rest of the painting. Through this I started to like working with watercolor and continued in improving my paintings.
Discuss one project where you felt you were the least successful. Explain why you felt this way and you would do differently to change this piece? Explain .
The project I felt least successful in is the masking fluid/watercolor Luna moth. I was less successful because I did not like the outcome. I felt this way because I didn't make enough layers with the masking fluid and had too much white areas. If I were to change the piece I would have waited before adding so much masking fluid until i already had a few layers on translucent paint. Then I would begin adding more layers of masking fluid. I would also let the watercolor flow around the painting during my final layers, to create a more colorful random effect. I think I would be more patient with the drying as well and not have controlled the the watercolor as much. I would rather have had more control over the outcome of the piece (without masking fluid) and used plain watercolors and the new skills I learned when working with watercolor paint.