Criterion D

After tracing my final picture on paper, we started working on it in art class. At that point i still didn't decide what media i should use, so for about ten minutes of thinking i came up with some media i could use. Ms. Sudra has yellow sticks, which i thought would be good for my hair. She then helped me decide how to do my background also. She said that i could use a sponge to give it the same effect as on the photo. When i actually got to doing that part of the work the sponges weren't available so i used a small towel. After finishing the background i painted the soles of my shoes black and printed each side of the shoe next to my head. The shoes were basketball shoes. I painted half of my face black and decided to leave the other half white. When i first thought about doing that i didn't know how that could represent me, but when i thought about it, it shows that i am kind of half black as in race. I lived in Africa for 2 years, i listen to hip-hop mostly and i like basketball. I am not trying to stereotype races of people, but usually when people think of someone who listens to hip-hop, the person would be black. If you think of the best basketball players in the world, they are black. So that is the reason for half of my face being black. For my shirt, again with Ms. Sudra's help, i chose to do the flags of the countries i lived in so far - China, Czech Republic, Zimbabwe, and Mongolia. I finished most of the artwork by now, i just need to finish the painting of the flags. I didn't come across any problems during the time i was working on it, except for not knowing what media to use. I still want to decide what to use for the other half of my face, if i will use anything, because i accidentally painted a bit of my face, the white part, blue so i could leave it like that, paint it white, or find another media i could use. I don't really want to use another media, because i think the black and white face looks pretty good and there is nothing else i could find that might represent me that i can put on that might look good.

29/09/09
Last art class on Friday, i finished my final artwork. I think it took me 3-4 art classes, which might seem like a short time compared to other students, but i don't think i needed to spend a lot of time on it. The medias weren't anything complicated, so maybe that's why it didn't take a long time. I think that i learnt or experienced using different media and that using all of them together might not look that bad. I usually thought that using variations of medias in one artwork was a bad idea, because it would ruin the whole work, but now i know that i doesn't. It actually is something new and looks good, unless you overuse medias. I think that my work is a lot different from any other students work, because some people i saw used completely different medias, and some people, according to me overused the medias and made it too crazy. The easiest part i think was to paint the black part of my face. The hardest part, not actually that hard, was probably painting in the flags, because i had to be accurate on the detailed parts for the Mongolian flag for example. Ms. Sudra helped me a lot, she gave me ideas for my background and shirt, which is most of the artwork. I didn't make any changes in the artwork, only using different media for my background and instead of printing out the flags of countries and gluing them on i drew them and painted them. If i were supposed to describe my artwork, it wouldn't be so hard, because it probably would be easy to picture, since it is nothing unusual or crazy. I would probably say picture a guy with blond hair, but change the hair to yellow wooden sticks. Then i would describe the colors i used, which isn't that hard to picture. I would not be able to help him/her picture the print of my shoes exactly, but kind of an abstract view of where the shoes are. I wasn't inspired by any artists, because the PowerPoint we watched from Ms. Sudra had complicated medias like chocolate, sugar or string. I would use these medias, but for me it is too messy to use and if i make a mistake, which shouldn't be hard to do, i would have to start over or deal with it, but if i did make a mistake i wouldn't like my artwork anymore, which would make me want to do another one. Overall i think that this project was quite fun, because we first of all could pick how we want to do the artwork and what media to use to make it. The IT part was also fun, because i have always loved editing photos on the computer, especially using Photoshop. I would recommend for teachers to extend this project a bit more and maybe do sequels to these works or just have more pictures, because i think that this project was kind of rushed and we didn't get to spend too much time on it so maybe by doing more artworks would give us more results and we might have a different view of the project. I would definitely like to do another project like this, especially if they are interdisciplinary projects. Working on the same thing in two classes is according to me better, because we wont forget what we did and we are working on the same project, but doing something different in each class at the same time. I think that this project will be good to use for the next years grade ten and hopefully they will like it as much as i did.