Art 2 Final Portfolio

1.      Which project was your most successful? Describe the theme and or topic and the process you went through to complete the project. Were the choices you made regarding material, size, technique, etc beneficial to enhancing this project. Please explain.

            It is hard for me to choose which project was my most successful because all of them never came out how I planned them to be. For some of my projects that would be a good thing. I feel that my sticky situation painting would be my best artwork in Art 2. I chose to paint a shoe with some gum stuck under it and other pieces of gum around it; I ran out of time to add some more color to the painting (I had to leave the background above the shoe white, so it looks unfinished to me). For this project we could choose between acrylic paint and water color paint, I decided to go with acrylic paint. I felt that I could incorporate more value into my painting by choosing this kind of paint.

            The shoe took the most time because the black color was really hard to put value into. I wanted my shoe to be a neutral color so I could put more emphasis on the pieces of gum. I also wanted to put a lot of different colors on each piece of gum and in the end I put almost every single color on the color wheel.  

2.    Discuss one project where you felt you overcame the most obstacles. What were those obstacles and how to work through them? Explain how taking risks or challenging yourself made you a better artist.

            The most difficult and challenging project was my Eminem Portrait out of M&Ms. My partner and I had to spray paint the M&Ms but the extremely cold weather conditions and the amount of time we had made it a very challenging task. Another issue was that it was really difficult to ignore the temptation to eat the M&Ms. We were also not able to get the right color spray paint that would work well with our portrait. This made it tricky to add value. Eventually we figured out a way to work through it by spray painting some M&Ms at home and buying mini M&Ms to place them in areas that needed small amounts of value. We also decided to take the risk of putting mini M&Ms around his nose so it would look more realistic. In the end, our portrait of Eminem was a little weird in the nose but everything else looked really good to us. 

3.    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.

            My two least favorite projects are actually the two that taught me the most. For these two assignments, we had to do an “up close and personal” and a “what’s the point” drawing.  My up close and personal task came out to be a lot harder than I thought because the material I used made it more complicated and time consuming. I had made three images of a frog getting closer and the frog’s eyes are red because I thought it would be cool to show some complementary colors and I wanted to emphasize the frog in the grass.  

           For my “what’s the point” project, I had decided to draw a bee because I was thinking of the stinger as being a point. Then as I began to draw I was trying to keep my bee in proportion to my background (It looks really big compared to the flowers to me). For my background, I had to fade the grass out to make it look more realistic and I had to blend out the flowers a bit more. Both projects may not be the best pieces of artwork I have done but they have taught me a lot. 

4.    This semester we introduced a new way of teaching and learning. Students had choices in subject matter and materials. Explain your thoughts on how effective this was (or if it was not) to your learning experience in this course. Provide examples through your art projects so we can see evidence of your learning. 

            Instead of the art teachers assigning us a specific project and telling us to do it in a particular way, we were allowed to expand our interests and to think outside the box. For our projects, we were told just the topic and the medium so then it was up to us, the students, to do the creative thinking. As our last project of the Visual Arts 2 someone thought of making a coloring book. Each student had to think of a situation that would follow the idea of the student before us to create an interesting story.

All of our projects have been a great way for us to learn different techniques and to take risks. It teaches us that there are a variety of ways to accomplish a task. For example, our 3D questionable project we could choose to do any medium that is 3D or will create something 3D. Some people chose to do clay, some chose wax, and some chose books.

It is funny how people will create something not even realizing that it may involve some other art concept in it. We could be using only secondary colors on the color wheel onto our project and we didn’t even notice or we could be putting complementary colors into it. Art doesn’t have to stay in the classroom, it can be used anywhere.