Reflection Essay

For my Final Exam: Based on the work in your art skill inventory and your work in your online protfolio, reflect in essay form on your personal artistic growth over the past year. What specifically have you learned? Where have you seen the greatest growth? In what area do you feel you need to improve? How can you use what you've learned as you move forward with your independent work next year? Consider your summer "Head and Heart" projects in relation to your play pages.

My very first drawing this school year was a figure drawing, and looking back it was as stiff as a mannequin. After learning about gesture and figure drawing at the start of this school year, I learned how to draw while standing up, drawing with charcoal on an easel, as opposed to sitting down with a sketchbook and a pencil. By standing up, it was easier for me to compare the model to my drawing, and I could find faults much easier this way. I was able to better analyze and document the figure as I saw it, and I also learned how to measure proportions to make my drawings look more realistic, as exemplified in my artist copy drawings on my portfolio. This is the area in which I have seen the greatest growth, and is the area I am now most confident in. I would even say that drawing figures is now my strong suit, and I look forward to ehancing my skills even more next year. While I did not use any human figures in my play pages, I was able to apply what I had learned about gesture and movement to create "explosions" in different mediums while knowing what elements and symbols to remove and which ones to keep for the artwork to remain recognizable as an explosion. I am not quite sure what I want to create for my summer projects, but I look forward to applying the skills I have learned nonetheless. I would like to create something more abstract, while still looking realistic. For this, I can use the skills I have learned from my play pages to keep my artwork recognizable, while implementing unrealistic elements. Over the summer and in my Junior year, I feel I should work on improving my confidence with my art skills, specifcially my tendency to draw on a smaller scale, only filling in parts of the page and leaving a lot of excess white space around the edges. This is something I have struggled with a lot, and have failed to correct in Art 3, so I will continue to work on my line confidence and enlarging the scale in which I draw over the summer. From my very first drawing of the school year to my latest oil painting, it is clear that I have developed and expanded my skills immensely this year. I am very pleased with the work that I have done, and I plan to use every lesson I have learned moving forward.