Drawing Final Portfolio

1. I think that my most successful project was my cat. The theme of this project was transparency and I showed that by having the cat looking through the fish bowl. The first thing that I did was find reference pictures, then I drew it on the paper with pencil. I started with the rocks, the plant, and the fish before I did the cat because they were in the foreground. After I drew the cat I drew the table and the wall and went over everything to fix small areas. Most of the choices that I made were beneficial to my project. I think that I picked just the right size for the proportions. I couldn't have drawn it with anything else in the art room besides prisma colored pencils or it wouldn't have turned out the way it did because they're small enough for detail and they blend easy. However I do not think that it is easy to get a wide value of color with them because we only had specific colors and that was what we had to use. I didn't have a very wide range of value on the walls or the table because of this. The technique I used could've been better if I had thought through how it would affect my project. I could've done something different with the fur on the cat's face more similar to the tail.

2. I think that my least successful project was the big gesture drawing. I feel this way because when I took a look back, it doesn't look like a real person to me. It looks more on the cartoony side and the proportions are a little off. I don't have as much value as I wanted either. If I could do something differently to change this I would have done more practice drawing other parts of the body besides just the face. I would have reviewed shading for folds and taken more time on it. Also, if I hadn't decided to do pencil at first and switched to charcoal it would've taken less time so I could spend more on detail. I would've also taken more time to measure Catie's proportions and put them on the page properly. A different position might've been better too because I think that this one has very little expression or emotion in it.

3. My two pieces that I chose were my perspective drawing and my transparency drawing. I think these two pieces show my growth as an artist because my perspective drawing was done in the very beginning of the semester and isn't nearly as good as the transparency one. They are also both in prisma colored pencils, so the growth that I've made also shows in how I apply the materials. Between the two drawings I've grown a lot and I think that it shows the most in the transparency drawing. Since the perspective drawing, I've learned how to apply the colored pencils in a way that I can achieve more form it. I've learned how to blend the colors that I have together to create value and how to do it smoothly. Looking at the two pieces it's also obvious that throughout the semester my artistic vision has improved. Instead of drawing something that was already there and that wasn't creative at all, I was able to take different things and put them together to create an idea that is my own. I've gained skill with the use of value and movement and have found ways to include it into my artwork.

4. I think that shading the folds and using the skeleton to draw the portraits were the two mini lessons that were most beneficial to their projects. By drawing the folds I started to understand shading a lot more than I had previously. Before it was hard for me to figure out where to put shadows and highlights in proportion to the position of the lighting. The portrait with tracing paper and the skeleton underneath helped a lot too. It was a really good guideline for placement of the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Instead of just doing what we were instructed to, it helped us understand why they go where they go. I think that the folds we could've just used a little more instruction by placing shadows on other materials as well so that if there's something in our final project that would be shaded differently than a fold we might have done a similar object to help. I don't think that we needed any more instruction for the portraits.

5. My favorite medium to work with was pencil. I liked working with pencil because I think that it is the easiest to control. We have so many different types of them, so it makes it easy to achieve a wide range of value. Also, I think that it is really easy to add detail with them since you can make the tip as sharp as you need. If you make a mistake it is very easy to correct it. I like that you have to use it the right way to get what you want. This forces you to concentrate and pay attention to what you're doing. If you change the pressure of the pencil when you're shading it won't come out the same so you have to be very careful and precise. I like the attention to detail that it forces you to have when you really want to draw something nice.