Final Art Reflection
Natalie Turner
1) Which project do you consider your most successful? How did you develop your craft with this assignment? What tools, methods and materials were essential to your success with this project? What ideas, feelings or meanings did you want your piece to express? How did you go about expressing it?
Personally, I consider this most recent Landscape photography project to be my most successful piece. I enjoyed using the dark room to print aesthetically unique and interesting photographs. I also believe that my work in this project was successful because I felt very inspired while taking photographs during our trip to Phoenix Lake. I really enjoyed experimenting with lighting and framing and I think that I was able to successfully capture unexpected moments within simple landscapes. The cameras that we used were essential to my success, as well as the dark room development process. Using different camera settings with the digital camera helped me to achieve the desired effect with different photographs. Also, experimenting with my developer in the dark room helped me to create unique and successful dark room prints. Having the ability to make appropriate adjustments to my photographs using Aperture on the computer allowed me to make the colors in my photos vibrant and interesting while emphasizing certain aspects of the photos.
The feeling that I was trying to express through my photography was a sense of serenity and peace. Although there is tension in my landscapes, I find the overall aesthetic of my photographs to be relaxing and serene. This was also the effect that I was going for in my dark room photography. I repeatedly used water in my digital photographs that was settled or moving slowly in order to portray this feeling of serenity. The natural elements present in my photographs also helped me to show peace, as I find the outdoors and natural world to be relaxing, especially when captured in a still photograph.
The feeling that I was trying to express through my photography was a sense of serenity and peace. Although there is tension in my landscapes, I find the overall aesthetic of my photographs to be relaxing and serene. This was also the effect that I was going for in my dark room photography. I repeatedly used water in my digital photographs that was settled or moving slowly in order to portray this feeling of serenity. The natural elements present in my photographs also helped me to show peace, as I find the outdoors and natural world to be relaxing, especially when captured in a still photograph.
2) Which project was the most challenging? Look at your brainstorming or original intentions for this project. How does the final work(s) resemble your preliminary sketches or plans? What changed? Why did you make the changes that you did? What problems emerged in the creation of this project? How did you solve the problems?
For me, I found the plaster sculpture project to be the most challenging for me. My final work very vaguely represents my original thoughts and ideas. During the brainstorming process, I found it difficult to transfer the three dimensional concepts that I had visualized in my head into a two dimensional sketch on paper that sufficiently expressed the idea I was going for. I found it very difficult to draw the different angles of three dimensional figures that I could conceptualize but struggled to physically plan out. I solved this issue by beginning my process with a two dimensional drawing and then forming the idea of the three dimensional final piece around the drawing, rather than the other way around. I found that this way made it easier for me to make sketches that accurately illustrated the effect that I was going for in creating the sculpture.
After handling my initial conceptual struggles, I also found it difficult to work with plaster. I had never carved with the medium before and I did not expect it to be as labor intensive as it was. However, through trial and error, I was able to successfully develop methods of carving and smoothing that made an aesthetically intriguing final piece. Throughout the physical execution of my idea, I struggled both with the medium and with successfully portraying my conceptual intentions. However, through experimentation, I found that I was able to create a sculpture that represented my ideas and concepts of strength and potential motion in a smooth and fluid plaster sculpture.
3) Please discuss three new strengths you've discovered or deepened this year. One formal strength (your ability to work with things like composition, balance, rhythm et cetera), one technical or media-specific strength (working in a specific medium or honing a specific skill) and one conceptual strength (your idea development in the specific project).
To begin with, I have become stronger with expressing rhythm through my work this year. At the beginning of the year, I typically preferred working with symmetry and balance in my work. I preferred all of my artwork to be very realistic and detailed. However, through the exploration of new mediums and the development of my technical skills, I became more adept with using rhythm to make pieces flow in a logical manor. I found that utilizing rhythm within various pieces allowed me to better communicate concepts and ideas while creating a more interesting final work. I found rhythm to be particularly important during the photography portions of the course and while utilizing Photoshop to create digital media pieces. Paying attention to rhythm helped to make my digital and darkroom photographs more intriguing to look at, as it created more of a sense of movement and interest. Also, when creating digital artwork using Photoshop, I found rhythm to be a key element in making a cohesive and complete-looking composition.
I have developed a strength in Photoshop. I had never used the program before partaking in this class, and I originally found Photoshop overwhelming and difficult to navigate. However, after a basic tour of its features and functions, I was able to play around with the program and experiment. Through experimentation, I learned to better use Photoshop and all of its useful features and tools to create intriguing digital pieces. The variety of Photoshop projects that we had allowed us to have a certain freedom to explore the program and play around with it for awhile, which I found was key to my success when creating my diptychs and my texture collage.
I found that my idea-forming and conceptual development processes became much more thoughtful and complex throughout the course of the year. Due to our focus on conceptualization and brainstorming for many of our projects, I had clear intentions set before I began to work on a project and this helped me to efficiently create meaningful compositions. For example, during our wire sculpture unit, as opposed to wandering into the project without basic framework, the conceptualization processes that we participated in allowed me to experiment without losing sight of my eventual goal, and it aided me in my focus on specific technical skills. Drawing several human figures repeatedly helped me to decide what it was that I wanted to represent with the wires. Eventually, through conceptualization, I was able to create a wire sculpture that conceptually emulated that photograph that I had brought into class.
