First Marking Period Reflection

     The first marking period is coming to end!  I feel like my outlook on art has changed.  I have always loved art,  but now I know much more about it.  I really learned a lot of  things that will probably help me with art in the future.  I was also surprised with some of the things I made.  I can't believe that some of the pictures I painted/drew are actually mine, and I'm glad I'll get to keep them forever in my book.  So far, Creative Arts is my favorite class!

Self Portraits

     After we finished drawing fruit, we started a new project: self portraits.  These aren't regular self portraits, though.  When we're done drawing them, we paint them with our own custom color and then cover them ink.  After the ink dries, we rinse them out in water.  Our final paintings are going to be on a huge piece of paper, but we practiced on regular paper.
     My favorite part of the whole experience was creating our own color of paint.  We did this by mixing basic colors of paint together, without using white or black.  I mixed blue and green with a little bit of yellow and purple to get my color.  To get lights and darks for shading in the painting, we added black and white to our original color.
     Once the paint was dry, we coated the painting in ink.  We had to wait for the ink to dry before we could rinse it.  To rinse the painting, we held it under the sink and gently rubbed it, which took away ink and some paint, leaving behind different textures.  We used colored pencils to touch up the paintings after rinsing them.  I just finished my practice painting, and am ready to start my big one!

Fruit Drawings

     We spent quite a while drawing fruit in art class, and by the time we had finished, I had decided I would much rather eat an apple than draw one.
    
     We started out by drawing a still life of whole red apples, green apples cut in half and cut oranges in pencil, without color.  This was the first time I had ever drawn fruit, and for me it was much more challenging than it looked.  Besides drawing the right shape of the fruit, you also had to have the right shading in the right places.  This was the most challenging part for me, and I wasn't very good at it.  I'm hoping that I can improve my shading with practice, and I'm sure that there will be plenty of projects in the future that will require shading.
    
     After we completed our black and white drawings, we moved on to colored drawings of apples.  We had to draw a whole red apple and half of a green apple.  Although my red apple turned out more like a tomato, I was pretty happy with my green apple.  Since it was much more flat than a whole apple, I had an easier time drawing it.  Also coloring it was simpler, because the mixture of colors in the white insides of the apple weren't nearly as intricate as the greens, reds, oranges and yellows of the whole apple.  I drew my apples on a background of yellow, orange, and red, and the page is now sitting in my folder, waiting to be bound into the book.

     Splattering paint on paper was how we spent our first few weeks of Creative Arts Class.  We would brush over the paper with water before dripping the very bright paint onto it.  Eventually, these papers would make up our sketchbooks, so I knew I had to make them interesting.
     Mrs. Kiick also taught us a technique called transferring.  Transferring is when you glue a magazine picture to paper by covering the paper in glaze and then rubbing the picture onto the paper.  I was amazed at the transfers some of the other students did.  Although I tried multiple times, I unfortunately could not successfully transfer a picture.
     When I found this crazy picture of Barbies in a foamy bathtub, and I couldn't transfer it, I liked it to much to throw it away.  So I took a short cut and instead of transferring it, I just plastered it to my paper with a lot of glue and glaze.  Then, after diluting the paper with a very plentiful amount of water, I dripped black and purple paint all over it and set it down to dry.  The next day I picked it up to find an already weird picture of Barbies surrounded by a creepy mist.  This is my favorite picture that I have made so far, and you can't find another one like it anywhere!

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog!  After spending a couple days getting  Speak Now to look exactly how I wanted it, I am finally making my first post!  When I first heard about the blogging project, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it because I am terrible with computers. In fact, one of the reasons I took the Creative Arts Class was to be as far away from computers as possible!  So, when Mrs. Kiick announced that we would be doing a blogging project all year, I was dreading the creation of my blog because I knew something would go wrong.  To my surprise, everything went well, and now I'm looking forward to a year of blogging about my experience in Creative Arts class!