Reflection
I did a lot of research about creative processes this semester, along with my own accidental experiment with my own, and I learned a lot. Firstly, my theme changed at least three distinct times. I’ve been confused and frustrated by my own inability to hold down a theme for a while now, and I think I’ve discovered something I never considered before. Maybe I can make things quicker than I have been in order to keep my themes consistent. Instead of waiting to explore a theme for a specific project, I can make other things that supplement the project to keep myself interested in the theme I’ve chosen. I watched a video about Prince’s creative process and how he sometimes wrote, composed, and produced entire songs in one day because he needed to get the creativity into something as fast as possible. I think I’m going to try to make art like that for at least a little while to test out if that helps me stay interested in an over-arching project longer.
I’ve learned that I love crayons and their upper-class counterpart: watercolour wax pastels. I’ve also discovered that I like sketching things out or doing re-colours or drafts of pieces digitally. I’ve gotten much better at using the digital drawing program I have, and I hope to learn the animation settings in it next! Another new media addition to my practice has been video essays. I really enjoy writing research papers, and teaching has always been fun to me, so making little video essays on random art-related topics was something I tried out and had fun with this semester. As for traditional media, along with the wax pastels, I got to experiment with combining my love for collage with drawing and painting. I know for sure that I’ll be using that technique in the future with my work. I really like the limitlessness of it, and the texture and depth it gives the end result is great.
As stated earlier, a lot of the research I did this semester was actually surrounding creative processes. Not only researching it but testing different routines on myself to see if anything worked for me.
I think that my drive to create without a project will be something I’ll continue to work on, but it was something I discovered I needed during this semester. I also know that doing lots of research on artists, movements, galleries, and art-related topics like I did during the course of this class (some as supplemental stuff I did for fun) will be forever integrated into my practice.
