Project My Art Piece, Artistic Expression is a project to develop artistic skills for the subject Educación Plástica, Visual y Audiovisual.

We will start working with the creative process, this is the process artists use to create their art pieces. Project My Art Piece. Artistic Expression is a research inside our own ideas, our strengths and weaknesses. It is better to be non-conformist and search for the best ideas.

You should search for a simple abstract composition using the basic elements of the image (dot, line & plane). For this first project we will use pencil and colour pencils.

All big works require different activities before we get to an ending “master” piece. So, we will be working in three stages:

Sketches (Bocetos). This is the first stage, you should try to find as much different solutions as you can in order to achieve good results.

You can do several sketches in the same piece of paper, also you can work in both sides of it. Sketches should have approximately the same proportional size as the final drawing.

Sketches do not need to be done perfectly, they are just quick drawings to represent an idea. This is the way artists do brainstorming.

Some useful guidelines:

1. Leave some space between sketches, it helps a lot to have a better view of them.
2. In a sketch, you can draw big and small elements, use different sizes.
3. Try different positions of the same elements. It is a good way to find new possibilities.
4. Do not erase the sketches you don’t like, they are as useful as the good ones.
5. Do not throw away your work just because you don’t like it, all your efforts are valuable.

Colour tests (Pruebas de color). Now that you have your idea and you have selected the best sketch, it is time to find out which colours fit perfectly to your drawing.

Again, you can do more than one in each piece of paper but keep in mind that they should have some space between them.

There is no need to do perfect colour tests, they are just tests. We will draw the accurate work in the final stage.

You can have a closer look to the colour pencils technique in the dedicated page.

Final or definitive composition (Definitivo). This is the result of our research, it must show all what we have learned during the previous stages.

You can select between two sizes for your final master piece: A4 or A3. As you know, A4 is size 297 x 210 in millimetres and the size for A3 is double: 420 x 297 mm.

There are some concepts that we will learn during this project.

• Technique. The correct use of pencils & colour pencils.
• Composition. How things are placed inside the paper.
• Colour. What colours communicate and the relations between them.
• Texture. Physical and Visual textures.

This project is going to be assessed in each of its stages. All stages are important as the whole process is going to be assessed.

In the sketches stage you will have to show your skills in the regular pencils technique. It is important to use the correct tracing depending on the needs of the ideas you are developing. The more ideas you have the better results you will obtain, it is a research stage.

The colour tests will help selecting the best colour scheme for your sketches. As the sketches stage, this is a research stage, you have to try different options before you select a final colour scheme.

In the final or definitive work all the previous work should be shown. Now we can really take care of the drawing and the colouring during our work.

The final mark is going to be an average of the three stages. Remember that the process is more important than the final result.

Here you can have a look at the rubrics for each stage: