Art 2 final exam

My most successful project this year I think was the canvas painting, I painted a mountain range in Boone, NC. I started off the the project by using my pencil and lightly drawing the mountains and valleys. Then I started mixing the colors I was going to need in my pallet and started to paint. I painted the valley first because it took the most time. After I finished the valley I moved onto the mountains and started to add finer details such as snow on the mountain tops and meadows in the valley. The part of this project was painting the clouds, I didn't use the right technique and they turned out blotted and non realistic. A mistake I made was forgetting to paint the sides of the canvas so I had to remake the colors when I was done and repaint the sides. Overall I enjoyed this project and the freedom we had with it. 

The project I was least succesful with was the peppermint candy drawing. It was very difficult to get the texture of the candy wrapper and the twist on the end. I also had trouble getting the right values in the lights and darks of the candy. I did learn a lot of techniques with this lesson such as how to add value and draw the texture of a wrapper. I started off this project by lightly drawing an outline of the candy and the twist in the wrapper. I had to play around with drawing the lines of the wrapper to make it look realistic. The second day working on this piece I got the hang of drawing the twist in the wrapper and began to add value. I used different lead and graphite pencils to get the right values and add finishing touches to the peppermint. 

I improved and grew my techniques in drawing and colored pencils. When I first started the class I was terrible at drawing pictures that were realistic but after lessons with drawing dum dum's I learned how to draw things in detail and capture the small parts of the candy. A lot of what I learned came from the first few weeks of drawing that we did in the beginning of the year. Such as drawing the side of the building and getting the right perspective. I got a lot of help drawing the Legos and learned how to draw in different dimensions. Drawing is by far my best improvement in art 2. I enjoyed working with prisma colors and seeing the difference it made in my art work. I also learned how to capture value during the lessons and how to use different shades to make the art life like. 

The dum dum mini lesson really helped me get expirence using prisma colors. I got a lot of good instruction during this mini lesson on how to use the colored pencils, we were given a lot of time to work with the colored pencils and get comfortable with them before we started on a final. I also liked the lessons where we learned how to shade in spheres to make them three dimensional, I learned a lot about how to place the shadow and how to show light sources. These two lessons helped me grow as an artist and introduced me to new techniques I had never used before. 

My favorite medium to work with was easily the prisma colored pencils. I could get the most realistic detail in my drawings with them. It made my art work pop and I enjoyed how I could still add fine details to my artwork unlike  paint and clay. I wish I would've done more with prisma colors because the lessons I had with them I learned the most. After I learned how to use them I incorporated them as much as I could in the projects after. Art 2 has made me grow as an artist and opened up my mind to different art perspectives and techniques, and  I hope to continue to grow as an artist.