Ideas flowing and minds racing. The final portfolio process has finally begun. For AP Studio Art students, the end of the class is nearing and it is time to bring their ideas to life. Senior Olivia Dixon is one of these students who has been working daily to put the pieces together to create the portfolio she has always imagined. After idea generation, Dixon gets to finally produce what she has been imagining since Art 4.
“We start with brainstorming ideas, I came up with a bunch of ideas for a bunch of pieces. I didn’t end up using all of them and I probably won’t use all of them, but I kind of just picked whichever piece I thought I could put into imagery the best and it just kind of branched out from there wherever I thought I could go,” Dixon said.
Each student has a main topic that they focus their whole portfolio around, and Dixon chose to inspire her pieces by her brothers.
“My portfolio is kind of started around my relationship with my brothers and how that has changed from when I was little and how it’s been in the past to how it’s developed now and then what I’m expecting in the future,” Dixon said.
Her brothers are a very important part of Dixon’s life so she was able to get so much inspiration from them to carry out the portfolio she had imagined.
“I initially wanted to do something surrounding music and I kind of made the connection that a lot of my relationships are kind of bound in music and with my brothers especially, since we have a lot in common,” Dixon said.
The AP Studio Art students had full creative freedom to construct their portfolios in whatever way they chose. Dixon went the collage route.
“I did mostly collage, so I’ve been making pieces of paper and using those to put together. Recently I’ve been block printing, so I carve into a piece of linoleum and print that and then I use that in the collage. I’ve also done some beading and I’ll sew beads onto the paper,” Dixon said.
Dixon took sculpting, block printing, and beading as her main form of art, but as for senior Rose Still, they took the more traditional route and used colored pencils.
“Typically we start with thumbnail drawings, and various brainstorming to figure out what piece we’re working on, then I get mixed media paper to sketch and do the line art, and then I finish it out with colored pencil,” Still said.
This project is something these students start brainstorming in August. It is a very long process that they must go through in order to execute the portfolio they had dreamed of. With a prolonged work process comes many challenges and bumps in the road. For Still, the challenges came from feeling pleased with their finished pieces.
“The hardest part has definitely been finishing the products in a way that I’m fully satisfied with. Each piece has things in them that I dislike, and in many of them I wish I could go back and redo, but because of the time limit it’d be difficult to,” Still said.
Similar to Dixon, Still decided to focus their portfolio on an idea that is very meaningful to them.
“My topic is how emotions can be linked to experiences and sensations…I felt like I haven’t ever talked about experiences and emotions I’ve dealt with in my life, and this topic allows me to express some of the heavier things I have a hard time talking about out loud,” Still said.
Heavier topics like this one call for an excruciating brainstorming process. For each piece of artwork, this process can take a couple of minutes or up to multiple days. It is a very time-consuming process.
“I think my least favorite part is just the brainstorming. Sometimes it gets really difficult to come up with an idea that feels just right, and I’ll end up going through days of
just thinking and sketching ideas,” Still said.
Despite many struggles, the portfolio-making process gives a major sense of accomplishment when a piece is executed in the exact way the artist had hoped. For senior Ava Debs, her favorite part comes from seeing her finished product, but also her growth along the way.
“My favorite part of the process is the progress I have made while making my portfolio. I have sharpened my technique with different materials, and I feel like even my anatomy has gotten better when drawing. When I look back at my earlier pieces, and then to ones I have created more recently I see my improvement, and it is very rewarding,” Debs said.