Summer Artist Statement

I’ve always loved art, however, this summer was the first time that I actually dedicated a significant amount of my free time to it. Unlike most summer homework assignments, I found this one exciting and I was eager to start even before the school year had come to an end. But even before I started this assignment, I already knew which art portfolio I was leaning towards: drawing. And as the summer progressed, it became even more clear to me that the concept of drawing and painting was the type of art in which I wanted to focus on.

Throughout the summer, I experimented with a lot of different types of drawing and painting both in my sketchbook and with the projects I created. Throughout my creations I used a wide variety of different colors and designs, as well as attempting to create a more realistic picture at one point. Overall, I felt that using my free time to experiment with paints really helped me to lean towards the drawing portfolio even more than I had in the past. While I did not have as much time to work on my homework as I would have liked throughout the summer, I was able to create about one sketchbook entry per week and continued to think about new ideas here and there even while I was busy. I felt that being able to continuously think about art helped me to expand on my overall ideas of pieces and to help me think outside of the box a bit more.

While I mostly just experimented with medias I was comfortable with such as paint, decoupage, and colored pencils, the one area in which I was pushed out of my comfort zone was photography. I have never been the best when it comes to capturing pictures, however, I am glad that it was part of the overall assignment since it caused me to try something new and helped me to get ideas for my other projects a bit. I would like to create more art projects based off the photos I took in the future, but hopefully I will be able to improve at photography even more so that I have more images that I can sketch from.

Overall, I am very pleased with my work throughout the summer; I found it to be the type of homework that I actually looked forward to completing. I felt that I helped me to be more independent with my art and to help my ideas and concept branch out and become more of my own. I have a feeling that I will see a lot of progress in my art throughout the year.