Art 2 Final Portfolio

My most successful project was my up close and personal oil pastel piece. The theme of the project was up close and personal so I had to decide what I could draw that would accurately represent that theme. I finally came up with the idea to do a ladybug on a blade of grass because I thought it would look cool and be reasonably easy to draw with my selected medium. Once I had decided what to do my piece on I had to decide what to do it in, so I chose to do it in oil pastels because I just enjoyed their look the most. I went for a medium sized piece of paper to do my piece on because I needed some detail but didn't want to spend ages coloring everything in. I had to work on my blending and saturating colors as well as lighting techniques to make the piece look good. Overall I think this was my most successful project because it looks the best in my opinion and it follows the theme the most clearly out of all of my projects.

I overcame the most obstacles this semester in my sticky situation painting. I faced quite a few obstacles during this piece and some of them provided very difficult to overcome and make work on the painting itself. One such obstacle was making the road and guard rails look right since they seemed to look funny every time I tried to paint them. Getting things to look like you want them to in paint is much different than doing the same thing in a drawing. Another good example of that is the vehicle crashed into the pond. Initially I was going to show the vehicle halfway broken through the ice but still sticking out some. This would have looked better but it proved more difficult than I had thought it would be. I drew the vehicle out just fine, but when I tried to paint it it looked really bad and inaccurate. In the end I just ended up painting a hole in the ice where the car was so the painting wouldn't look so bad. In taking a challenging subject to paint I learned how to make a mistake on a painting look ok and work out in the end. Mistakes and challenges in art don't mean you have to give up.