Rachel

The reason I picked this picture was because I thought she looked really expressive and intense. I also liked the black and white color better because it showed her muscles and every detail in her shorts well. It fit me better then all the other pictures I looked at, because I love basketball. The hardest part was getting her eye to look real, not just like a white circle on her face. I just kept adding shadows to make it pop and look more life-like. Another part I had to work at longer was her arms and hands. Each have so many darks and lights that I tried to capture. I just kept squinting, stepping back, and looking back and forth between the original and my figure drawing. I am happy with my figure drawing overall, because when I compared the original to mine they looked very similar. I enjoyed and thought I handled the oil pastels well, and am glad that I didn’t use acrylic paint. If I were to work on my drawing more I would take more time on the arms and hands. I believe that this figure drawing has helped my art skills and creativity a lot, and I am glad I got the opportunity to do it.

I chose this theme because I love animals, especially dogs. I think dog fighting is sad and one of the worst crimes. I have never witnessed dog fighting, but I'm connected to it because I have dogs. I would never want them or any dog to have to go through that torture. Some problems I encountered were trying to cut the wire to make the dogs fighting cage. Also I wanted to get my dog to chew on the cardboard so it would look real. But for as long as I tried my dog wouldn't because there was ink on the cardboard. Since my dog wouldn't cooperate I had to use scissors to make it look like a dog scratched it. The scissors ended up cutting my finger a few times which hurt. Other than that my art work went pretty smoothly. I believe that my art work is successful because it portrays the social event of dog fighting properly. I also think the collage part of the project turned out well. The pictures and text looks organized instead of all over the place. I believe the imagery persuades the audience that this social issue is wrong. I also think that the dog scratches that I made with the scissors were successful in portraying the fighting part of my social issue. Overall, I believe my piece of art is successful in persuading the audience that this social issue is an issue. If I was to do this project again I would of chose the same social issue because it speaks to me. I would have made a second dog figure though, and I would've made both dogs fighting. That would have shown the sad and intense part of dog fighting; instead of just the one dog injured, laying down. Other than changing the clay figures I wouldn't have done anything else differently.

The artist is portraying genocide- the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. I believe this picture looks like the artist is portraying the Holocaust. Their view point is how terrible wrong, and devastating it was in history. Genocide takes place all over the world still; for example: Africa. The skeleton is someone starved in the holocaust and they're holding what looks like their old life. Also it shows buildings with smoke that look like the crematoriums in the Holocaust. These artistic elements emphasize the terror and pain so many people went through.