Q3 Artist Statement

This quarter I did a lot of new art pieces that I have never done before. We started the quarter off with a bicycle, where we had to attempt to draw a bike by looking at a previous sketch, then drawing from memory. This was very difficult for me, especially the proportions. I am used to drawing with nothing but pencil, so that part was easy. However, afterwards we could clean up the bike by using the same sketch for reference. This bike was on a much bigger paper than I am used to drawing on, so this was a good exercise on testing my abilities. After this, we had to create an optical illusion. This assignment was very fun, and for my illusion I chose a drawing that I used to make a lot as a child. For the medium, I used a combination of sharpie and colored pencils. I made a heart that appears to be jumping off of the 2-dimensional surface. I think it is very clever, but simple, and I really enjoyed the final product.

After we finished the optical illusions, we went on to practice shading. Although I do enjoy using graphite pencils a lot, I feel like this project forced me to use them to their full potential. Before this assignment, I did not shade well, and it always ended up looking choppy. For this project, we followed a guide that was a tutorial on how to shade. I found it a little tedious, but I think in the end it improved my skills. From this assignment, we moved onto drawing our eye, in pencil and in great detail. I loved this assignment, because I love drawing eyes, and the detail in eyes is very fascinating. I always doodle eyes on my notebooks and such. This assignment was relaxing and I loved how the end product turned out. The last assignment we had was to draw a mandala. For this assignment, I used brightly colored permanent markers. I think this assignment forced me to be more creative than the other assignments, because we had to completely conceptualize the mandala from scratch. I think the hardest part of this assignment was making it completely symmetrical, but in the end I enjoyed.

Overall, I think this quarter made me expand my artistic abilities a lot. I am really glad we did the assignments we did, because they pushed me out of my comfort zone to try new things. I am really excited for the challenges and projects to come in quarter 4!