1. My oil painting was my most successful because I took my time on it and I'm really proud of how it turned out. It was a good picture to do for my first oil painting because of the sky and hammock and all of the different elements. It's not too detailed and has a good amount of perspective too, which seems like the best kind of picture of recreate with oils. I learned a lot about how to work with oils, like how to blend them and work with different colors. I think the use of oils helped the perspective with the sidewalk and street because if I had used acrylic the ground would probably look flat and be one solid color. I'm glad I chose this bigger canvas opposed to the smaller one I originally had because I like how everything looks big and simple and bright. I don't think I would've been able to fit everything in a smaller canvas with everything still looking good, and I think you get a better feel for the scene with it being on a bigger canvas.
2. My St. Maarten beach watercolor was my least successful project this semester. I didn't utilize the watercolors and the colors didn't turn out how I wanted them to. I got too dark with some of the colors, like on the airplane and buildings. I should've used more transparent layers to get more color variation. More transparent layers would also help the fact that the paper got messed up on the buildings because I used too much water in the same spot at one time. I think this would be a good picture to paint using watercolors, and if I were to do it over again I'd just plan on working slower and being more careful with my colors. It's hard to fix watercolors once you mess up, and trying to fix my mistakes is what messed me up the most on this piece. Focusing on one part of the picture at a time would've helped me.
2. My St. Maarten beach watercolor was my least successful project this semester. I didn't utilize the watercolors and the colors didn't turn out how I wanted them to. I got too dark with some of the colors, like on the airplane and buildings. I should've used more transparent layers to get more color variation. More transparent layers would also help the fact that the paper got messed up on the buildings because I used too much water in the same spot at one time. I think this would be a good picture to paint using watercolors, and if I were to do it over again I'd just plan on working slower and being more careful with my colors. It's hard to fix watercolors once you mess up, and trying to fix my mistakes is what messed me up the most on this piece. Focusing on one part of the picture at a time would've helped me.
3. My scratch board and oil painting were the two projects that helped me grow the most this semester. They were both new mediums for me, and learning about how to work with each of them was a fun and new process. The scratch board helped me to better my planning process because that's something I always rush through. I knew I couldn't erase anything after I scratched it, so I made sure to be careful and plan out the entire picture. I stopped to look back at my progress every couple of minutes so that I didn't get out of hand and scratch away too much. I think I did a good job with this because no "mess up" parts stand out to me. My oil painting was a whole new learning process because the oils are so different from acrylics. I learned how to work with them to get the results I wanted. I also love the composition of the picture with the cool perspective. I think everything turned out in proportion and that the perspective looks good.
4. The contour line drawing and charcoal practices helped me the most for my charcoal portrait final. The contour drawings definitely gave me a better grasp on perspective. They also helped me to look at whatever I'm drawing as a whole. The charcoal practices (the one on the right) also helped with proportion because they were of full-body people and so was the project. My drawings from the beginning of each day to the end of each day progressively got better, and by the end of the week I was doing them a lot faster than I was in the beginning. I also figured out what charcoal I liked best and how and when to use each of them. I had never used charcoal pencils before, and all of the values turned out better when I used all three types of charcoal. I don't think I needed more instruction for success because this was the one project where I practiced a lot beforehand.
5. The clay was my favorite medium to work with because it was the most creative project I did. I loved figuring out the best ways to form the frog while still keeping it fat and hollow and frog-looking. I hadn't worked with clay in a while, so it was fun to play around with it again. I enjoyed painting it crazy colors however I wanted. Not having to copy a picture or anything and getting original with the painting was fun, and it's probably the most free and creative project I worked on. Although I had more freedom with it because it's 3-D, it still looks like what I had in mind and what I had drawn out in my plans.