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In what specific ways does your art show growth?  What is the most significant way you have grown as an artist?  What artistic struggles did you learn from?  Where would you like your art to go from here?
One of the most important attributes an artist can have is patience. The ability to repaint the same thing over and over again, adding new layers each time, or the ability to work on a background for days without ever starting on the main focus of the piece. This semester, my patience has grown immensely. I have always been the type of person who wants to finish a piece quickly and then move on to the next piece immediately after.  This is shown in the difference between my earlier pieces, especially my first semester pieces, and my last piece, the mural. In the purple girl I did first semester, there is almost no background. I wasn't willing to spend time on something that wasn't in the foreground, and my creations suffered because of that. However, in the middle of this semester I did a piece that was all background, which helped me grow a lot. I had never focus on such a complicated landscape before, and having to sit for weeks working on the same bit of water or the same building really helped me grow as an artist. I'm proud that I was able to take the skills that I learned while creating the early piece and carry them to my last piece of the year. This piece was special because while it did have a foreground, I was able to learn from experience and had the presence of mind to start with the background and finish with the birds. However, I still have a long way to go as an artist, especially regarding patience. Although I did gain the ability to spend a long time on the same piece, there were many days where I was unable to envision what the finished product would look like, and because I didn't like the way it look at that exact moment, I wanted to abandon the piece. I need to learn to a least finish a piece before I decide that I don't like it. From here, I would like to improve my detail skills. I have always been good at using sweeps of color to convey my image without, say, drawing every blade of grass. I also always tend to work really big, because that's just what I prefer to do. In the future, I would like to be able to create things that look like they took a lot of effort and a long time to create, and the only way to get that effect is to improve my detail work.

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Acrylic, Metallic Acrylic

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Oil

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Pencil

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Watercolor

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Pencil

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Old Canvas, Newspaper, Acrylic Paint

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Water color and Oil Pastel

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Oil paint

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Colored pencil, oil pastel

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One area that I see improvement in is my spacial awareness. I am able to look at the space around and between figures and draw that, instead of drawing the figure itself, which I wasn't able to do before.

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Things I did well,
Oil: I used the oil well in this piece because I was able to make use of the oils longer drying time and blended multiple colors together on the canvas to create a sense of depth, and to create the illusion of light and water.
In the style of another artist: I tried to convey a Van Gogh-y feel in my piece, which I think I did well. Van Gogh used lots of visible brush strokes and bright, exaggerated colors, so I tried to do that as well. He also used short, horizontal lines to create water in his pieces, which I also did.
Nature exploration: Though most people would not consider a cityscape an exploration of nature, I believe that by combining the organic pieces of the water and the light, I was able to show the contrast of the nature with an urban environment.
Things that could be improved:
Lines: My piece could have been improved by continuing to use a ruler while I painted. The beginning sketch on the canvas had all straight lines, but after adding layers of paint, and going over the edges a little bit each time, the sides of the buildings started to slant towards the middle of the piece.