I believe that of all of this year's projects, my most successful work was my final landscape painting. I developed my ability to focus on small details rather than try to absorb everything at once and get ahead of myself. I used oil paint for the first time with this project, which I actually really liked because of its consistency and the ease with which I could spread it and change its thickness. In creating my piece, I wanted to create a feeling of calmness and serenity, which I did by not using very many harsh brush strokes, and mixing my colors pretty thoroughly within an object so that there wasn't too much blatant contrast between different areas (unless they were different objects).
I think that the most challenging piece this year for me was my silhouette ink drawing. Looking at my preliminary sketches, they were all very detailed, and weren't really silhouettes. I think that I was just trying to get a sense of the subject itself, but I didn't focus on the outline as much as the details inside. In the final ink drawing, I did focus more on the actual silhouette, instead of all of the minute details, which made it a pretty different style. This was actually fine and I'm happy with the outcome of the project, but the silhouette of the tree that I chose proved to be extremely detailed itself, and was extremely tedious and time-consuming to be copied five different times. There wasn't much to be done about this problem except to dive in and put in th necessary time to finish it--I had already committed to this silhouette and I really liked it, it was just hard to stay that focused for that amount of time. However, I did it and it turned out pretty well.
This year, I think that a formal skill I have developed has been my ability to work with different values, and my color-mixing abilities. I've painted more this year than I did last year, so I've had more opportunities to practice these skills, and I am proud of my progress in color mixing and creating realistic values for the subjects that I paint. A technical strength I have improved has been my ability to hone in on specific details of a piece and put in a lot of concentrated effort on those small areas, rather than try to concentrate fully on the entire piece at once, which can be overwhelming and hard to focus on all at once. A conceptual strength that I have developed over the course of the year is my ability to create a piece of art that conveys an emotion. I think that I've become much better at using certain kinds of brush strokes and color variations in order to express a feeling, such as in my artist emulation project, when I used a scene of a lighthouse blocking an ocean view in order to convey the idea that mandate objects are obstructing natural beauty.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Landscape Final Reflection
My intentions for this project were to communicate a realistic sense of the light in the landscape. I think that adding a realistic light element in my scene really helped to define the different values in my painting, because it added variation to the different shades of green. If I hadn't used the light to enhance the color scale then it would have been a lot more bland and monochromatic.
I addressed my self-defined theme of landscape by including a foreground and a background in my painting, and by covering a pretty large area of space in my painting. I also think that I used my artistic voice by portraying the scene pretty realistically, except for a few details, like the texture of the large tree on the right.
In our feedback discussion, I received comments about the light on the bushes, and the texture on the trees--which were details that I focused on, so I would consider my work pretty successful in terms of accomplishing my intentions.
I think that in this project, I was able to improve as an artist by developing my ability to focus finitely on one aspect or detail of my work at a time. I think that for many of my past works, I have tried to bring everything together too soon, and I focused on how the whole painting would look at the end of the project. However, through this project I learned to direct my focus on one small thing at a time, and take it little by little in order to create an end product that I am satisfied with. This did a pretty good job of representing my formal/technical strides over the course of this year, because it brought everything together one aspect at a time and created a painting that I am proud of.
I think that I "stretched and explored" pretty well with this project--in the past I haven't really focused that much on light because I thought it was too hard to fully communicate through a painting. However, in this project, that was one of my main focuses, and I think that I did a pretty thorough job of including it in the way that I intended.
I addressed my self-defined theme of landscape by including a foreground and a background in my painting, and by covering a pretty large area of space in my painting. I also think that I used my artistic voice by portraying the scene pretty realistically, except for a few details, like the texture of the large tree on the right.
In our feedback discussion, I received comments about the light on the bushes, and the texture on the trees--which were details that I focused on, so I would consider my work pretty successful in terms of accomplishing my intentions.
I think that in this project, I was able to improve as an artist by developing my ability to focus finitely on one aspect or detail of my work at a time. I think that for many of my past works, I have tried to bring everything together too soon, and I focused on how the whole painting would look at the end of the project. However, through this project I learned to direct my focus on one small thing at a time, and take it little by little in order to create an end product that I am satisfied with. This did a pretty good job of representing my formal/technical strides over the course of this year, because it brought everything together one aspect at a time and created a painting that I am proud of.
I think that I "stretched and explored" pretty well with this project--in the past I haven't really focused that much on light because I thought it was too hard to fully communicate through a painting. However, in this project, that was one of my main focuses, and I think that I did a pretty thorough job of including it in the way that I intended.
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