To Be or Not To Be an Artist
STEM Foundations
Final Draft of classroom scene.
STEM Foundations isn’t a basic class. STEM Foundations is a class that teaches us how to critique, teaches us our Five Qualities, and involves many projects. One project opened my eyes to the beauty of art. We did a storybook project. This storybook project was a project where a set of partners had to illustrate and write a book. The book was to be educational and entertaining to third, fourth, and fifth graders about being able to effectively solve a conflict. After completing this project, I realized that I had grown in many areas. Specifically, I had grown in using techniques to create better art in the medium of watercolor.
In the start of the project, my partner and I discussed the plot of our story. We decided that the storyline would be about school supplies fighting over the fact that some of them got to be used a lot while others were not used as much. The supplies that didn’t get used a lot got jealous of the supplies that were used often. They decide to hold a competition to figure out which supply fit into the position of ‘Best Supply.’ As this was occurring, two erasers understood that everyone has a purpose in life and that no one is inferior to another. They used their conflict resolution strategies to solve this problem. The plot of the book then inspired the title to become ‘We All of Serve Purpose.’ After developing the plot of the story, we moved on to illustrating the book. We first had to pick a medium. A medium is a tool that people use to create art. Watercolor was the chosen medium for our story book. Watercolor is a kind of paint that uses water to create the traditional wet feeling that we use to paint.
Page 16 of storybook, Draft 1
Page 16 of storybook, Final Draft
Page 16 of storybook, draft one. I had made a rough sketch, using watercolor, of what this page in our book would look like. This page was supposed to show two colored pencils talking to each other. Looking at my first draft today, it looks nothing like what I was planning it to be. As you can see, I have not used much color in my work. But being in a class and spending the entire time doing art, you tend to learn a couple of terms. Hue is one of them. Hue is a color that can be found on the color wheel. Hues do not include black, white, or shades of black and white (grey). The hues that my partner and I used were red, green, and blue. The reason my first draft was not my best draft was because the lines that I used to outline the colored pencils were not straight and they were curved. In this draft I only used a little bit of red and blue paint on the tip of the colored pencils.
After completing this draft, I knew that a lot of improvement had to be made. I knew that to make spectacular artwork, I couldn’t do it alone. My partner and I both used the parts of art that we were good at to create one solid piece. Together, we created page 16 of our final storybook, draft five. My partner was very good at outlining the colored pencils. This was her talent so that’s what she worked on. I worked on shading the colored pencils in which I learned a new technique. I learned how to use a wetbrush to get a light shading on my picture. There is also a technique called drybrush. I used drybrush to get a darker shading. I used a mixture of drybrush and wetbrush to create texture on my colored pencils. The reason for the two different techniques to create a different shade is that the wetbrush uses more water for the paint while the drybrush uses more paint and less water. The goal of the project was to make illustrations that would have high craftsmanship. By using different techniques for watercolor, my partner and I were able to create a piece that boosted the quality of our final storybook.
If you flipped through our storybook, you would see page nine. Page nine would have the final draft of the supplies’ classroom. I went through almost ten drafts to create the walls and desks on the page. The technique I used to help improve my piece was using a sharpie to make the lines sharper and straighter. To make the color of the desks, I had to learn a new term. Brown wasn’t one of the hues that we chose for our limited color palette so my partner and I learned and implemented the term, value. Value is the shade of the color and the amount of white or black in the color. We mixed red, white, and black to create brown. We had to be conscious about how much black or white we were putting to make brown so that the color wouldn’t become too dark or too light. By being careful about this, I was able to create realistic tables for the final product.
Creativity is a skill that should be developed for future projects and even future jobs. By learning many techniques to help create a masterpiece, I was able to make my work superior. As a 7th grader, I am still not a professional artist but I have made a plan that will help me develop this beautiful idea of art. I need to practice drawing with different media and observe techniques that will help me form the image. The storybook project was a stepping stone that brought me a little higher to my goal of being able to create art. In the future, I am not planning to go into the art field for I am interested in going into the science field. In science, there is still art involved as far as modeling atoms, drawing the human body, different ideas, etc. Learning craftsmanship from this project, will allow me to be able to model these different things so that my ideas will be able to get across to others.
