Finding the perfect color.

 My many attempts of blending red, green and yellow too get the right color for my apple. Also, my attempts to get the right shade of a cream kind of color for the inside of my apple in our second project with apples.

Time to reflect.

    Can you believe that we are already finished one marking period?! I am excited but at the same time a little upset. There is only  three more marking periods and then i graduate and i am off to college. I remember last school year my friends and I all wanted to take art together, now that I am in art I realize art is not just a class you can just blow off and not try in. This class is hard and not just because i can't draw very well but because it really gets you into what you are working on. I never really took to much interest into drawing and I would always just draw a stick figure and give it a face and there you go! But now i am drawing a self portrait of my self, so now it is bye bye stick figure and hello two dimensional drawings. In the beginning we had to draw fruit and it was a challenge and it was fun and I learned that there are different kinds of pencils you can use. Yes, different kinds and i am not just talking about colored pencils, I am talking about regular pencils. We have three different pencils we have to use and they all give off different shades and one is soft, another is hard. After only using the pencils for shading we moved on to colored pencils. Colored pencils are not as easy I expected, they are difficult to work with, but with a lot of practice i believe i did an OK job with them.I feel that with colored pencils or just adding color to a picture can draw attention to different spots in a picture and they can bring out a certain part of your picture if you blend the right colors together. Also, you get to just have fun with a picture and use colors that probably wouldn't even match the original picture.Finally, we are doing self portraits in class and it is a long process. When I first started this project i was just erasing and drawing and erasing. This project taught me how to draw a nose, eyes, eye brows and mouths. When i first started drawing my eye brows they were just half circles but Mrs. Kiick brought to my attention that my eye brows have more curves in them and they aren't just half circles. This drawing made me feel like i wasn't making any process because i was just drawing a part and then erasing it for an entire class period. Eventually, i noticed that my frustration and anger was being put into my drawing and even though I thought i was getting know where with the drawing I was progressing and I was turning a bunch of lines into an art piece.


   Going into this art class i had my mind set on the fact that it was just coloring or painting different objects and then saying 'Tada! i have a master piece that Mrs. Kiick can show everyone.' But art isn't that at all, art is actually analyzing what is in front of you and looking at the different points of view of an object and mapping out the dimensions of where to place a certain spot. Who ever said art was an easy thing to do and that it is common sense and you are just painting lines, well you were wrong. Art is so much more than just painting lines, it also takes skill that i am hoping i find that skill to improve even further than where i am at now.


   When the going get tough, DON'T stop and quit. There have been plenty of times where I am just like ' why did i even take this class?' or when i am just like 'ok art is not for me because i can't even draw a nose or an eye.' But when I step back and look at what is in front of me I realize that what I am doing is hard and that this experience will require anger to come out and frustration to occur more times then one. No matter how many times i say I want to quit, I am starting to believe that I don't even think I can quit. Drawing is fun and I am learning new things and it is stress releaving because all I have to worry about for the 40 minutes or so I am in class is what color to use next or what part of my face to draw next.
 
 In future art classes and for the rest of the year I am hoping I improve and I show myself that comfort zones are not the only thing I can succeed in.

Self Portrait, say whaaat?!?!

Not many people really want to draw themselves on poster paper. So, when Mrs. Kiick told us that we would be drawing ourselves on a poster paper I got scared. How am i supposed to draw myself? Yes, we are going to take a picture of ourselves and just draw it on a different piece of paper but how do you enlarge yourself? After drawing many little squares on my paper i was able to draw myself.

                                                         Amanda, where are your features?!
Right now we are tracing our original drawings and trying to find a color that we like to paint our self portrait. So far my progress is at a stand still. /: I seem to be able to just mix and blend and lighten or darkening the paint and then just paint! In a sense that's what we should be doing but when I look at my photo i notice i don't only have one color i have shades and highlights and dark spots. I am currently trying to find the right colors and the how to add in the dark spots and how to change to light colors. Even though this challenge is difficult I know I will find the right color and I will distribute the right amount of color from one spot to the next.

Apple: Colored Pencil Drawings.

Drawing with colored pencils or crayons I always thought i was  like a professional artist until they were introduced to me in art class. I have never really looked at an object and tried to define the colors of that object. When we were asked to draw an apple and color it, I was excited. Then, Mrs. Kiick was talking about how many different colors were in this picture and how to define and pull out the greens and the reds and yellows and sometimes there could be blue. Blue? Blue in an apple, yea right, but when we took our picture of the apple we didn't have any boundaries, we could have made the picture rainbow colors. we just had to make we defined the spots that were dark and the spots that were light and the highlights. This process was a struggle, but a fun struggle. It kept me changing colors and getting angry with what i was coloring and i was really getting into the picture. No more outlining a picture and then lightly coloring in the picture, now i was using colors i didn't know existed. Who said fruit was easy to draw?!

Apple: Pencil Drawings.

   When Mrs. Kiick told us we would be taking a photo of still art fruit and drawing them and shading them with only pencil, I thought 'how hard can that possibly be? I mean taking a pencil drawing the fruit and coloring it in with a pencil, it can't get much easier.' Well, i was wrong. Shading and drawing fruit is way harder then I imagined it to be. I felt like I was shading too dark or not dark enough. Sometimes i kept thinking "why am I in art class right now? I can't even draw apples and oranges and then shade them in." But eventually, I got the hang of how to shade and how to hold the pencil so there were no specific streaks in places they shouldn't be at. I had fun shading in the fruit and it made me try something completely out of my comfort zone, it was very weird and not the norm for me but I got used to it and I know I am a pro at it now !

Welcome !

Welcome to my blog. This year in creative arts class we were asked to do a blog and to tell what we learn, do and experience in art class.  I am a senior and this is my first art class i have taken and my first time blogging. I am not too sure how this whole blogging thing will turn out but it is never too late to try something new. My goal for this blog is to not be boring, show my creations and encourage others to step out of there comfort zone and try something new. Lets begin, shall we?