2022 to 2023 Reflection

Over this year, I have learned a lot about both techniques and new mediums like oil painting and woodcarving. Looking back on my old art skill inventory, one of the biggest areas where I have improved is composition - at least when I think about my composition. What I mean by this is that some of the more current play pages that I have done and my still life have much more interesting compositions than my original still life play page. I still don’t always have great compositions though. If I don’t think about it much, I sometimes make an interesting composition and sometimes I don’t, so I think that if I tried to put a little more thought into it - not even as much as I had for my oil painting - I think that would generally have a really good impact on the rest of my work. Working on the composition for a long time for the still life helped me be more aware of composition though. I’ve also learned a lot about color too this year. If I’m being honest, I don't completely understand simultaneous contrast, but working on color theory has helped me be more conscientious of how different colors affect each other, and I was able to use that in my still life especially to get the whites to look like different colors of white.

When it comes to things that I’ve learned about my process rather than specific techniques, I’ve learned more about what level of planning is good for me. At the beginning of the year, I really did not like planning for projects that I was working on, but I think that I have gotten better at it. For my installation home project I didn’t do a gigantic amount of planning, but once I came up with the concept on paper, I did think about what I was going to do each day which was helpful for me so that I could think of solutions to problems that I had had earlier. On the other hand, when we did the acrylic painting experience, I wish I had taken some time to make a plan each time I looked at what I was doing because there were quite a few areas where I painted over things that I really liked. Moving forward, I want to continue to try and come up with a little bit of a plan on how I’m going to do something before I try and do it like how I did with the installation project.

One of my favorite things that I did this year was making the installation project. The first part I made on it was making a cardboard armature structure underneath all of the fabric for structure. It was really fun to think about how it would all structurally work, and the way that I made it could have also looked pretty cool on its own without the fabric if I had made it with a nicer quality. Next year, I want to try and make things like the installation project that have a more structural aspect, or at least are sculptural. Something that I think I could improve on with a similar project to the home project is how it would hold up over time. This didn’t really affect how the documentation of my project looked, but after a couple of weeks, there were a lot of areas where the fabric was falling off of the cardboard. Trying to make pieces like this last longer might not be noticeable for when I document it since I would take pictures of it right after I finished, but I think that it would make me feel a lot better about the quality of my work.