Reflecting on group work

Working on an art project in a group is extremely different than working by yourself. Overall I think that working in a group is a lot more challenging than working on your own. A good thing about working as a group is you get a lot of different ideas and ways of thinking. Someone else might come up with a really good idea that you would never think of. What is hard about working as a group is getting everyone to agree. Each person thinks of things in a different way and has very different ideas. I found that whenever one person would get an idea, someone else would understand them and agree, and the other two would either not understand, not agree, or both. It was very hard for us in particular to come up with an idea that everyone wanted to use. Even though the people in my group are really good friends, we each have a very different way of looking at things. Even after we had our idea and started working we still had disagreements. Now I think that it was a bad idea to work with my friends. Things would get really heated and by the end of art class we would be completely clueless on what we were going to do. In a way that is a good thing because once we finally found an idea that we all agreed on, we knew it was a very good idea. 

Busy dance recital

End of Term 1 Reflection

This term in art class went very well for me. Every day I would look forward to art and I would be really excited to finish a project I had been working on, or find out what the next assignment was going to be. I learned many things in this class. I learned a lot of different drawing techniques and overall I improved on drawing from observation. At the beginning of the year I was nervous about drawing from observation. I was unsure about how I would start and I would constantly worry about what the final drawing would look like. After this term I have a better understanding of how to work on those assignments. I now know to go from general to specific and just go with what I see. Out of everything we did I was the most happy with the way my sketchbook turned out. At the beginning of the year I was worried that I would not know what to draw every week. After a couple weeks I decided to experiment with many different materials and designs and in the end it turned out a lot better than I had expected it too. If I could go back in time and tell myself something it would be that all the assignments are a lot easier than they seem, and once you get started everything starts flowing.

Chair With Coat.

Todays still life was more complicated to draw. I think this because you had to get every piece of the chair perfect where in the past you could just draw and it would look similar to what you were trying to do. Also the shading was very hard for me. It was hard to tell the difference between the wood and the leather of the chair. The skills I have used to draw this are shading and proportion. I used shading by showing the difference between two parts of the chair and having them not look like the same thing. I used proportion by making everything where they should be and the right size so the drawing doesn't look way out of proportion

pros and cons of dancing

For my glass half full drawing I drew two pictures of the pros and cons of dancing. The first picture I drew was a picture of a dancer with a broken leg. This shows something bad that can happen when you are dancing. I drew a girl in a leotard and a skirt with a boot on her leg and crutches under her arms. The leotard and skirt symbolize the dancer while the boot and the crutches show how she is injured. In the background I put a ballet bar and a picture of a dancer in the air to emphasize the fact that she is a dancer and wants to be able to get up and dance. In this drawing I used a lot of contrast to make the dancer stand out. I drew the background in pencil so that it would be lighter than the charcoal i used to make the dancer. Also the dancer is a lot larger than the background she is in front of. The second picture I drew was a picture of a dancer on stage dancing in front of an audience. I showed how happy she was to be up there by putting a smile on her face. I made her larger than everything else on the page for contrast to make her stand out. The curtain in the background is also drawn by pencil to make it lighter. At the bottom of the stage I drew a bunch of circles to look like peoples heads. All of those circles are repetition flowing from one side of the page to the other.   

Fabric Drawings.

This activity did not go as well as I hoped, but it also did not go bad. At the beginning of the project I was very frustrated, overwhelmed and I did not know what to start with. Towards the end I was getting the hang of it and realizing what I was doing. It felt weird to recreate it, since it was so hard to draw and I felt like my drawing did not look even close to what was in front of me. I liked this drawing better than the sticks because you could tell what you were drawing and there were many colors. Also things were not straight there was alot of flow which made it easier to define.

Principles of Design Research

The piece of art that I looked at today was called the border between Mexico and the United States by Frida Kahlo. The artists use of The Principals of design supported the story because it showed the differences between the lifestyles in Mexico and the US.