Art- Evaluation and Reflection

I have enjoyed this art project a lot more than I thought. This is because I thought it would be very much drawing based, with no sculpture creation. However, the project surprised me because I learnt a variety of new skills such as bookbinding and batiste and I was able to choose any art method to create my final piece.

The whole of my project was based through the theme of chance, meaning I didn’t purposely choose any of my topics. Throughout the first few days of the project I was really just experimenting with the theme of chance. For example I undertook a collage workshop, where I explored different techniques like batiste, mono printing and collage. I really enjoyed this workshop because it gave me an opportunity to try out new materials and methods to see which ones would work best for my project. Overall, I discovered that I worked well with batiste because it’s quite an abstract method that I would enjoy developing. Another workshop that I undertook was bookbinding, which was very interesting because I had never done anything like this before. I felt like I worked well with the bookbinding method because I was able to be very imaginative and use imagery to create the narrative. Overall, I felt that the workshops helped me with developing my ideas for my final piece for the art project.

For the next part of the project I created a generation machine, which I used to choose my theme for my final piece. I chose to roll a dice because I was able to choose 6 themes that I may have had a chance of getting. I rolled the dice which landed on 4, meaning the theme I had for the rest of the art project was ‘Light’. My first thoughts about the theme light were that it’s a very developing aspect within art and that it can be shown through many different art methods e.g. photography and sculpture. I had a few initial ideas of what I could create as my final piece, which were either a sundial to show shadows or a lightbox to project colours and words onto a wall. I chose the lightbox idea because I thought it would be the most challenging and as well as being art, the process of photography would be involved too. I wanted to create coloured slides that I could add and remove whenever, to create different effects. So I choose to use acetate and either paint them to get a smooth effect or I also used cellophane to create a rustic feel. I created the lightbox with cardboard and left a few holes on either side of the box, so that I could put the slides in. I also created some designs of how I wanted and thought the projection of the slides would look like on the wall.

After planning my lightbox idea I chose to gather some artist research and see how different artists respond to the theme of light. For example I researched into Jennifer West, who uses a light filtered effect on the camera frame when taking photographs. I liked her work because it gave me inspiration on how I could create the acetate slides for my lightbox. I also completed some primary research, which was looking at different light sources to see which one would work better with my lightbox. I then gathered a variety of photographs of my lightbox and acetate slides, as well as the projection of colours on the wall. I also experimented with shadows, which I incorporated with the projection of colours.

Overall, I feel that this project has gone very well because I have learnt and developed a range of new art methods and techniques. Also I think that the chance theme has been very inspiring because my theme has been chosen for me, rather than taking my time to research each of them first before choosing. I am going to develop and consider the chance theme in future projects.