In this unit Artist Solve Problems our tasks were to create a piece of art with a limitation. The limitations we used were to include newspaper in a piece of art, use materials in nature to make art, and we chose our final limitation. For the final limitation, we chose to not be able to touch our canvas directly; this is explained in depth in our video.
During this unit, my perspective on limitations have really changed. I used to think that limitations were something that held you back, and that your quality of work would be reduced knowing you had a setback. However, after going through this unit i realized that the limitations helped us in coming up with ideas. I found when we were brainstorming how to get around the limitation, my group came up with so many creative ideas that would have never even crossed our minds without the limitation in place; it promoted creative thinking and inspired us to try something new.
In our first project, we were forced to use newspaper in our piece. My group used our problem solving skills and found that when you roll up newspaper, it becomes stronger and can hold itself up; we had some prior knowledge on using newspaper from the box challenge. From here we constructed a huge DNA model made entirely out of newspaper and decorated with paint. Our second project required we use materials from nature to make anything we wanted. Since there were several leaves, flowers, and berries in the small wooded area near our school, I used all of these materials to make a fish underwater. I chose to make a fish because when i looked at all the leaves i collected, they all had points and rounded edges on them which reminded me of fish scales, heads, and tails. I felt it would be interesting to arrange these items into a fish. To complete the piece i used water color to paint the blue sea around him. Lastly, we had to make our own limitation where we could not directly touch the canvas, which is explained in our video.
While working with our limitation we selected, our ideas were the most creative they have been ever since we began this class. However while we were working with the paint, we realized our original idea of using water guns and spray bottles with thinned paint was not going to work; the paint would shift around too much and the color would not be as intense as regular paint would be. To solve this problem we used regular brushes to fling around our paint. What we ended up with was beautiful, abstract pieces that really draw your eyes in and can be looked at from several angles. I believe this unit produced some of my best work.