Quarter 2 Artist Statement

Quarter 2 Artist Statement 
Thea Risher 

Over the course of this quarter, I made many different pieces and styles of art. These included blind contour drawings, a painting of our own choice, a recreation of a famous piece of art, an illustration from a piece of writing, and an edited photo. Because they were all very different, the process was extremely different for all of the pieces. I used many mediums I had not used before, such as watercolors or photo editing tools. In this artist statement, I will review everything I did, as well as how I grew as an artist. 
It started with the blind contour drawings. For this art, you had to draw anything you could see without looking down at your paper or raising your pencil from the paper. At first this technique was difficult to me because I felt that they needed to be perfect. Once I got the hang of it, it became easy to just draw with my instinct and let it look funny. It showed me that art does have to be perfect or meet anyone’s standards, but could also be fun and stress-relieving. I drew mostly the people around me, myself, my hand, and my hair. I began to enjoy the freedom and simplicity of it. We had to make 10 of these, then we had to color the blind contour drawings as best we can. I used a combination of markers, highlighters, and colored pencils to do this. We could use our eyes for this, so the color ended up making them look more polished and pretty. I used different color schemes for the different drawings, and I really enjoyed the final product. Next piece was my favorite of the quarter, which was any painting of our choice. I chose to use watercolors, because I was curious about how they worked and had never used them before for the most part. I painted a path in a forest, with different colored leaves. I made the branches with a very dense brush and darker brown paint, then made the leaves with washy oranges and reds. I finished with sparkly watercolor paints. I learned that a little bit of water can go a long way. I really pleased with how it came out, considering it was my first time using watercolors. The next assignment was to recreate a piece of art by a famous artist. I chose to do one of the famous still lifes by Paul Cezanne, because I admire his work and technique. I originally wanted to use acrylic paint to recreate his painting, but could not capture the detail the way I wanted to. I ended up having to start over, and decided to just try sketching it. I liked the sketch much better, but I had to work on it at home because I wasted a lot of time trying to use the technique of acrylic painting. This piece was one of the most difficult for me because of changing mediums in the process, but the end product turned out very good in my opinion. 
The next art piece was an illustration for a piece of writing. We were given a lot of freedom in this assignment, so I decided that I wanted to do an illustration for a song. The song I chose was Pink Matter by Frank Ocean. For this illustration, I wanted to do the silhouette of a woman surrounded by pink watercolors and full of galaxies in the middle of her body. I started by painting the background, then drew a woman’s profile on top of the pink layer. The profile was difficult to draw, so it took a few tries. Then, I colored her in with black acrylic paint. Once the paint dried, I drew white stars and galaxies and such. I thought this was a very fun art piece because I love music and was glad to incorporate my love of music into my art pieces. Lastly, we had to edit a photo. This was by far the most difficult assignment for me. It was the only one in which we had to edit a photo online, and I had a lot of trouble with this. Twice I completely edited my photo, only to have the photoshop app crash and lose all of my work. It would have been much easier to edit if the software was not faulty. Nevertheless, I think this was a learning experience because I had to learn to operate different photoshop tools, which will be useful for my future. 

Comments