Beginning Drawing 2016-2017 Corinne Lynema

My name is Corinne Lynema, and before this year, I had never considered myself any good at art. It was something that I had always enjoyed, and yet it was not something that I had ever tried to work on, aside from classes in Elementary and Middle School. This year, however, I thought that it would be a nice change of pace to take my first year of High School art. The pictures below depict my art throughout Beginning Drawing, showing how I've improved and what I've learned over the course of the semester.

This was one of the first real pieces we did during the beginning of the semester, and one that helped me with a lot of the more technical portions that are important in art, including texture, space, color, lines, shapes, form, and value. I was particularly happy with how the form section turned out, but regardless, this entire piece helped me open my mind to what I would have to be focusing on for the rest of the semester.
Though not one of my favorite pieces, this is where you start seeing how my art improved from the beginning of the year. This started to help me see how to look at the negative space around the object instead of the object itself, expecially on the side of the drawing with less detail.
While I perhaps like the beginning of the year drawing more than the later piece, this was the first time that I had tried something with this much focus on negative and value space when using it with value. I'm proud of the value in the way that an onlooker can tell where the lightsource would have been coming from, and the space of it puts focus on the hand as the hand is so obviously different from the background than it is set against.
This was one of my favorite pieces. After the self-portrait turned out to not be as great as I had hoped, I was extra determined to make this piece something that I would be proud of. This was the first time that I fully got the concept of looking at negative space and value instead of looking at the picture I was drawing as parts of a larger thing. I was particularly happy with how the face turned out.
This is definitely the other of my favorite pieces. I thought at first that stippling would be very difficult for me, but I found that it was one of my favorite things, and it was really happy with how it turned out. The main element of this was the value, which was done by placing the dots made further away from eachother accordingly. The hardest part of this for me to do, which is also the part that I turned out to be the most proud of, is how I distinguished the shoelashes not only from eachother, but also from the rest of the shoe.
This was the first time that I really had to focus on drawing things from life and drawing things according to where other things were. The negative space in this is especially significant, since it's blacked out to put focus on the other parts of the drawing. I am mostly proud of this piece due to my improvement on it from the practice piece, because while it's not pictured above, it was a lot messier than the finished piece above. I'm also really proud of the flower that sits towards the top of the drawing, because it was possibly my first successful drawn flower.
While the subject that I chose to draw didn't allow for particularly much value, mostly because there were only really black and white shades, you can see some value in the way that the background part of the badger is a darker shade than the rest of it. This was done by not pressing as hard with the blade, and, similar to stippling, by moving the marks made so that they were slightly further away from eachother. The texture was supposed to be in a way to show the badger's fur, and this was done by making lines with the blade that could be similar to the long strands of fur of the badger.
This was the point where we started working with vanishing points and horizon lines in order to properly portray 3D shapes. I felt like this was the first time since the elements of art piece that I had fully been able to express the form portion of art, which was absolutely not how I had previously thought that it was. The use of the vanishing points and horizon line allowed for there to be a system to distinguish how an onlooker would see the different shapes, and the value that came from this perspective.
While the final product was definitely not perfect, imy improvement throughout the semester is especially apparent when looking at these two pieces. The placement of some of the facial features is off, though by themselves they aren't bad, and I feel like I had some of the sizes wrong proportionally. The parts that I do like are texture that is apparent in the hair, as well as the value in the drawing.
Though this piece is not finished, I'm quite happy with how it has been turning out. I especially like the apple, and it was interesting to learn how to do the oil pastel blending that allowed for me to create the values that I had used for the apple. As I finish it, I will be finishing and expanding the background, partially to include the shadows created by the rest of the object. The flowers were probably the hardest to draw, as I had to work out the appropriate mix of light and heavy pressures with the right colors to create the colors that I wanted the flowers to be.

In conclusion, I learned a lot throughout my first semester of High School art. If anything the class helped me to see things more creatively, which is something that can help me a lot in the future, even though I don't plan on getting a job related to art (I currently plan on getting a job related to writing). The class was really fun and it felt like a nice break from some of the stresses from all of my other classes. Overall, taking the class was wonderful, and I look forward to taking more art classes in the future.

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