Go Through a School Art Project With Me

One of the biggest problems with school art classes, in my opinion, is that they restrict students WAY too much. Most aspiring teenage artists want to experiment, and when they have to spend a whole semester drawing bowls of fruit, it can really kill their motivation (I speak from experience!!).

But now that I’m taking grade eleven visual arts, the teachers have taken a step back and let the students be more or less in control of what they’re making. In this blog post, I’ll be discussing my favourite assignment from class so far. I liked this assignment because it gave me so much freedom: the guidelines were incredibly loose and basically gave me the ability to make whatever I wanted.

For this project, we were to randomly alter pages of our sketchbook using the following techniques/guidelines:

• Wet on wet blend using watercolour

• A pattern using the upper page

• Use three analogous colours in any media

• A monochromatic page

• Balck & white page

• Cut and paste (collage)

• Use of solid colour

• Create texture

• Mixed media (try using 3-5 different media)

• One page experimentation (your choice!!!)

That was pretty much the only instruction– you can see why it was my favourite assignment. We were given ten classes to finish it, meaning one page per class.

I did complete the whole project and ended up with ten pieces, but for this post, I’ll just talk about my best ones.

The first one is one of my favourites. This piece was made for the analogous colours prompt. No, the whole page isn’t an analogous colour scheme, but each fish uses three analogous colours. This was done in watercolour.

Next was the collage page. I made this lizard using ripped up pieces of magazines. The biggest challenge with this one was finding the right shades of blue and purple– I basically ripped our school magazine collection apart trying to get the perfect colours.

For the black and white prompt, I used some Micron pens to draw these masks. The top four I used references for, but the last two are from my imagination. Let me know which one you like best! So far most people like #5.

For the wet on wet prompt, I was in a rush. It was Diwali and the night before all ten pages were due, so I did this one super fast. Considering that I was rushing, I think it turned out pretty good. I made a sort of rainbow with the watercolour and then researched a different flower for each colour. Then I tried to find the shapes of the flowers in the watercolour.

Next is the solid colour prompt. For this one, I was trying to be “extra creative” and wanted to do something more 3D. I played around with the idea of doing another sort of collage with construction paper, like a more advanced version of this.

But it ended up very different. I made a small paper shrimp. He’s definitely my favourite of all the prompts, I think he’s the most creative and the most well made. All I used was red and orange construction paper, scissors, tape, and a glue stick.

For the “pattern using the upper page” prompt, I just drew some quick birds and added a yellow background with pencil crayons. Even though I rushed this one too, I like it a lot.

I’m super proud of this next one. I was inspired by an artist I saw on Instagram (@ruandchai) who often makes realistic paintings of traditional Indian foods. One of my favourite Indian foods is a south Indian dish called dosa. It’s basically a crepe with a spicy potato filling, usually served with various chutneys and sambar. So I decided to make a mixed media drawing of a dosa. I mostly used watercolours and used coloured pencils to add texture to the dosa. I used acrylic paint for the green chutney. I painted it on really thick so it dried with some texture. Acrylic was also used for the potato filling and the vegetables in the sambar. The only thing I don’t really like about this painting is how dismal the colour scheme looks. I think it’s the gray plate mixed with the dull brown of the sambar. Next time maybe I’ll try a more colourful plate!

That’s it for this post! This was a super fun assignment that I would definitely try again on my own in the future. Let me know which piece you liked best in the comments.

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