Journey Through Art: Evolution of My Gallery's Works from February to April

At the start of this semester starting in April I walked into my art classes not knowing about so much of what I was going to learn and the effects it was going to have on art. My mentor for this art class is Artist Oliver, she has been teaching for over 25 years and had taught some of my colleagues, so I was exited to learn her secret methods.

Our first piece was a collection to talk about a collection of art pieces that had a special meaning for us. I chose a variety of art pieces I had seen as a kid with my family, this symbolized comfort and the memory I had, although not thought about exactly what I was going to say to the class so I had small stutters and I forgot I was saying once or twice throughout my presentation, I also didn't say exactly what I was planning to, from when I was thinking about it. My mentor, Artist Oliver taught me about the importance of spending more time planning for not just my presentations but for my art pieces as the process and thinking before even starting to lay down a stroke of paint can determine how good or how bad it will look. This was a big surprise to me as all of the art classes I had taken in the past only put emphasis on the painting part and not the planning and refining.

Moreover, after our presentation I also learned the importance of perfecting and editing my presentation until it couldn't be better. This was a similar situation to the previous lesson, I had not learned about this in my previous art classes, which meant that this was something I could implement to improve the quality of my paintings as well as their presentation.

I immediately took this feedback and implemented it in my next art work, showing my adaptability and willingness to learn, my mentor shared this amazing quote on the first day that has stuck with me ever since, "Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better"; I have carried this quote with me, it has helped me quite a lot with the editing and refining process after the base of my piece is done. Look at the images shown bellow to see how I have been editing the pieces of art that I create.

Using what I learned to Create Better Art!

Look at the piece shown, this was created after learning about how to make my work better using refining as well as process work.

Process Work:

As I learned throughout my first few lessons, process work is just as important as the painting component of making art. I took this teaching and applied it to this piece, look at the images shown to see the process work I used and how it is an equal or bigger to my actual piece.

Refining:

One of the other main lessons I learned throughout this semester was refining and editing, look images to the left to see the refining I did for my first assignment and the middle and right sections to see the refining I did for one of my more recent pieces.

Proof Reading:

Another area I grew significantly in, was proof reading. Not only have I started to proof read my work more than once, but I have also got peers and others to look at my work before I put it up in my gallery, look at the final product and the number of errors in my first piece compared to one more recently.