Look at your artwork over the semester and choose 2 pieces that show your growth as an artist. Discuss each piece and how you grew in the following areas: application of materials, techniques and skills, artistic vision, use of the principles and elements, creativity, intuition and subject matter.
After looking over the entirety of my Art 2 semester, I chose to display and use my watercolor peppers and collage to show my growth as an artist. I picked these two pieces of artwork because these were the pieces I was most proud of throughout the semester, and that I also had the most fun creating. For the peppers watercolor piece, this was the end of practicing with colored pencils and watercolors. Before this unit I had little to no experience with watercolors, and because of this, was not confident using them and was using them incorrectly too. However, during the unit, I began to learn how to use watercolors correctly and was able to produce a piece using watercolors that I was very proud of. I used different techniques I had learned throughout the unit - mainly layering of different washes - and used darker and lighter colors to create depth and shadows in the piece. I also used colors different than the main color of the peppers, such as purple on the red pepper and brown on the yellow pepper, to create these shadows, a skill I learned during the watercolor unit. Similarly, skills I learned throughout the semester helped to create this collage that closely recreated the photo I took. This photo was of the Great Smoky mountains, and I chose to make a collage of the image because of the colors and the scenery of the image. Before the semester, I would not have been able to accurately or proportionally recreate this photo, but now at the end of the semester and after learning techniques from units such as the photography unit, I was able recreate this photo with the correct proportions. This added to the realistic aspect of this collage. Throughout each unit this entire semester, I have learned lot of new skills that advance my skills and techniques while creating different pieces of artwork with different mediums. I do believe that I have grown a lot as an artist over the course of the semester, especially when looking at pieces I created towards the start of the semester versus more recently.