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.