2. The project that I felt I overcame the most obstacles with this semester was my dog portrait. The assignment was to create a 3D portrait of someone or something that you personally knew, and to use a different type of material to create it. When I first received this project, I had absolutely no inspiration. It was actually pretty frustrating for me, and I wasn't really interested in the project at all. I didn't know how to create a portrait with found materials of a person. Just when I was about to give up, I had an idea. Instead of doing a portrait of a person, why not an animal? So I found a picture of my dog as a puppy (pictured above on the right) and began to get to work. Now, I had to figure out what type of material I should use. Once again, I was stumped. So I went to the craft store to get some ideas, and that's where I found the rocks. I decided to use different sized black and white stones/rocks to recreate my dog's picture. I began by drawing the outline of my dog. Than, I hot glued different colored stones, using my picture as a reference to the location of the different colored spots. The third obstacle I faced was hot gluing the stones. I had to make sure to put each one in the right place, other wise, they wouldn't fit together to form the picture. Once I was done, I painted two round stones, one brown and one blue, to use as the eyes. But even after finishing the dog, the background just looked boring and bland because it was cardboard. I was stumped once again, this time, what to use as a background. That's when I decided to recreate the rocky background in the picture. So I cut out different sized rectangle construction paper pieces and glued them down. I took a risk with this project but doing an animal while everyone else was doing people portraits. Taking a risk made me successful in this project because it made my project unique and helped it to stand out. Overall, I overcame a lot of obstacles in this piece, but I think it really turned out nicely in the end.
4. This semester, I was introduced to a new way of learning and teaching by having choices in subject matter and materials. I think this was effective for me because I had more freedom and could use my creativity when developing my ideas for my projects. One example I have for this benefiting me was with my mixed media project. In class, we did several exercises that helped us develop our ideas and create our own techniques with materials such as newspaper clippings and different colored tissue paper. Once I began my project, the only limitations I was given was to create something with the theme of amusement. So I decided to make a collage of underwater/ocean because I love going to the beach and swimming/snorkeling in the ocean, and it brings me amusement. Being allowed to have more freedom with my artwork helped me to be more original, and it also gave the class as a whole a bunch of variety with our artwork. Having more freedom also gave me the chance to make mistakes and to learn from them in my own way. For example, in my mixed media project I made the edges of my cut out jelly fish too rough. After realizing this, I knew I had to fix it so I smoothed it with gel medium and water. Overall, I think this way of learning and teaching benefited me as an artist because it gave me the chance to be creative and improve.
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