Art Final Exam Essay

Over the course of this past year in Art 3, I feel like I have grown in a lot of places but also fell short in some personal art goals.  To start off, this year has been very enjoyable and I have learned a variety of new techniques and approaches to art.  Additionally, based on my art skill inventories, I definitely feel like I have improved in some categories, but have also stagnated in other areas.  This past year has also provided me with a good foundation and a good understanding of various mediums to help me better understand what my personal style is and define what my art will be in the future.

Over the course of this year I have learned a lot about art and about new ways to approach it.  This course has helped me learn about a variety of not only art techniques, but also Art History, which I have found to be really helpful in seeing how art develops, what pressures lead to changes in art, and has even tied in with other classes such as English and AP European History.  Personally, learning about the New York School of art was very intriguing as it is something that I haven’t really been taught about or exposed to, all I’ve seen were the artworks, but knowing the actual artists and their lives made their art much more interesting.  Along with this, I have also learned about new mediums and new techniques for the future, such as indirect painting and oil painting as a whole.   Also play pages have been very useful as a method of research as it allows me to discover more about interesting topics while having fun with it and I might try to study with this method later or just use it to learn how to draw faces.

The most major improvement I feel like I’ve seen is in figure drawing and mainly gesture.  When comparing my artist inventory figure drawing(which I distinctly remember liking at the time) to my more recent figure drawings it's like night and day.  Firstly, my style of drawing figures has shifted from a more anatomical approach, with every part of the body basically being drawn separately, which leads to a stiff figure, to a more loose style focused on gesture.  This I feel is a major growth as I am now able to better depict the motion of a figure and balance, but am still able to work in my more anatomical approach by maintaining a semi-realistic style.  Additionally, the Artist Copy project boosted my interest in learning more about figure drawing and anatomy and having a better understanding of it, and I feel that without the variety of projects we had, it would have been much harder to discover things that I am interested in improving as I am forced to work outside my comfort zone.  I’ve also found myself doing more artist studies and practice pages than previous years to further my understanding.  I feel like I have a much greater appreciation for practice pages now and using a sketchbook to sketch, as before I was kind of scared to draw anything bad in my sketchbook and wanted every drawing to be refined, but now that I am more open to just doing bad drawings to practice, I feel like I have grown.

To go along with this, I feel like my gesture drawing has improved, and I’ve found myself liking this looser style of drawing or just doodling rather than the refined, everything must look perfect style that I previously had.  For example, something that I’ve liked to draw over the course of the year has been animals and dragons, and while I don’t think I’ve improved in that as much as figure drawing, I still noticed major differences between my earlier drawings and more recent ones.  The creatures just look more fluid and unique and I feel like that is an important part of gesture drawing.

However, when comparing my artist inventory skill life with my oil painting still life, I definitely feel that I have stagnated in the still life department.  Mainly because I don’t really like drawing still lives, but I recognize that they are important for understanding fundamentals of art and I feel like I do need to improve on them so that I just have a firmer grasp of topics like composition and color theory.  Additionally, I definitely need to improve on drawing portraits, mainly faces.  I have done some studying on how to draw facial features, and can do quick gesture faces, however I have a hard time tying all of these together and find myself not practicing faces as much because they are hard.  Hopefully by next year, I will start practicing them more and have the same improvement I did with figure drawing. I'll try to work on some face play pages over the summer.

Finally, as mentioned previously, due to the large variety of skills and materials we have worked with this year, I feel like I have a great general understanding of what I want to work on in Art 4, however I am also now faced with decision paralysis(luckily there's still art 5 to work things out).  I definitely want to incorporate figures into my future work to some extent and would love to work with acrylics and maybe oil paints.  Additionally, our abstract expressionism unit has been very fun and freeing and has been my favorite unit so far and will definitely continue making similar pieces later and over the summer.  Speaking of the summer, some continuations on the “head and heart projects” I will be interested in doing would definitely be more figures, however I would also like to refine my abstract style as I found my large abstract class artwork very fun and one of my better art pieces and would like to find a replicate-able, yet fun style.

All in all this year has been very fun, with growth in some areas and not so much in others.  It has been a great blueprint for how I should improve as an artist and I would love to gain as much knowledge and experience as I did this year next year.  This class has been great and hopefully prepared me more than enough for Art 4.