The thing I’m most proud of about my project is the variety of styles and techniques present in my artwork, and how much I learned through wanting to pursue things I’d never tried before. I think a great example of my learning is my digital artwork. Creating this piece involved learning how to use image layers to separate different parts of my picture, making my workflow more efficient. I also learned about specific types of layers that interact with parts of the illustration to create vibrant shading, and highlights. I familiarized myself with how to select and deselect specific parts of my piece, then edit them to my liking using tools like the magic wand, navigating the numerous Photoshop menus to find specific ways I wanted to edit my work. Adjusting to the lineless, clean style I chose for my art also lead me to learning about alpha locking, which allows me to limit the area I can edit to only what I’d already drawn on a given layer. I can confidently say I know much more about how to create art in photoshop now than I did before, and that knowledge is something I can apply to the art I create in the future.

Another noteworthy example of my newfound knowledge is the acrylic painted piece. In contrast to my digital piece’s simple, clean style, my acrylic painting style was a lot looser, abstract, and was inspired by old impressionist paintings. Using messy and natural brush strokes to make depictions of clouds, trees, and buildings, was definitely a technique I was unfamiliar with. Up till this point, I had only been familiar with drawing very defined art styles. Yet, as I gained more experience painting with acrylics, I really grew to enjoy the freedom that the less defined impressionist style offered. One thing I particularly like about this piece is how I was able to convey depth of field as the islands move further into the background. I gave this impression by subtly blending the colors of the islands with the blue sky. Blending colors in general was a really fulfilling experience; constantly adding and re-adding colors to get just the right hue (shade of color) and brightness. It brings a feeling of interactivity that only this medium of art can provide.

However, working within the Propel program wasn’t all smooth sailing. I ran into quite a lot of challenges in the making of my artworks, and I also realized many things I could improve concerning my work. The biggest challenge I faced with my art pieces was settling on the compositions and perspectives of each picture. Creating an initial sketch that I was happy with was something I didn’t predict was going to be so difficult. The majority of my time conceptualizing my pieces was dedicated to composition alone. This led to challenges not specific to each of the unique mediums I was experimenting with, but rather with learning more fundamental skills of art. Some things I struggled with drawing include one-point and two-point perspective, human anatomy, foreshortening (which is making things look like they fit into the perspective), depth of field, lighting, shading, and color theory (which is the understanding of how colors interact with each other). Creating the sketches for the final artworks was a huge wake up call to me, it demonstrated how much more I can learn and improve my art through understanding the basics and building upon them.

When I was creating the alcohol marker artwork for example, I was obsessed with getting the initial sketch absolutely perfect. So obsessed in fact that I neglected to focus on all the stylistic choices I was going to make with the markers. By the time that the composition was done, there was barely any time to create a final good quality picture. I rushed out my artwork with poor coloring, shading and a paper quality that ended up unintentionally leading to all the marker strokes becoming smudgy and visible on the paper, which is something I did not intend for.

A similar situation happened in the creation of my watercolor piece, where I had spent so much time creating the sketch that I didn’t account for any of the problems I might face when I’d end up applying the watercolor paint to my base drawing. The biggest mistake in the making of the watercolor piece was making one of buildings too saturated in color, throwing off the entire atmosphere of the piece. Thankfully, due to the flexible nature of the watercolor medium, I was able to paint over that saturated color to hide my slip up.

I encountered various similar problems related to each medium across the making of every piece, such as not expecting watercolor paint to take so long to dry, or colored pencils to be unerasable. The most consistent problem was that a good number of the mediums I was working with required that I draw every brush stroke, line, and color perfectly the first time I did them. It was quite daunting, and it caused me to put off the final pieces till after I’d extensively practiced each medium, in fear of messing up the final sketches I’d worked so hard on. Because of this fear, I think the mediums that I personally feel I performed the best in were the ones that didn’t have this limitation, those being, my digital, and acrylic art pieces.

The digital piece in particular was the one that I was most surprised turned out well. For context, before settling on making individual art pieces, I was originally going to make a comic book issue as my project. It was planned to be made completely digitally, and early on, I dipped my toe into digital drawing and my first impressions weren’t so positive. I was overwhelmed with the number of options available to me, and it felt unnatural to sketch something on a screen as opposed to paper. In conceptualizing my comic, I was unmotivated, and I procrastinated quite a lot. Working on it felt much more like a chore than pursuing my passion. You can see the results of my efforts below; a simple comic panel that served as a proof of concept for my larger project. Though not bad, it’s definitely not my best work. You can see places where I colored outside the intended lines, and it feels smaller in scope than I’d originally intended.

When I later revisited the digital medium for my art piece, with some experience on my belt and a healthy helping of motivation, I think my skill as an artist really started to show. The options that once intimidated me, became tools I could use to further improve my art (especially because there was no fear of making mistakes thanks to the magical undo command). The biggest factor in why I think the art piece was so much better compared to my comic panel is the increased motivation I felt in my new project. When making the comic, there wasn’t really any direction, the main goal was just to “draw well”. The more outlined structure I had created for my art pieces which consisted of learning about the mediums in question, conceptualizing ideas for an artwork, and creating that artwork helped to keep me in line. I wasn’t procrastinating anymore, it felt fulfilling to work on my project; overall my experience creating digital art was quite enjoyable, despite my early frustrations. In hindsight I think that finding a project that fits you, and motivates you is what makes the best projects succeed. It certainly helped me, and I think that the final product is much more representative of my skill because of it.