Lately, I have been busy preparing for my GCSE Art exam, which actually begins today! I have ten hours of work ahead of me now and decided I would share some of my preparation with you. I have never shared any of my art on my blog but today I decided to branch out a bit and share some and if you enjoy please let me know!
The exam board our school is on for art is AQA and therefore I had to choose from one of their seven topics – I chose detail.
I began with a research page all about details everywhere in life – from fashion, architecture, nature and the face. I followed on from this deciding to study further into details of the face – particularly the eye.
I then studied a couple of artists – one who works in coloured pencil and one who works in graphite, my two favourite media to work with. You’ll notice that after this point that I got really into my splattered backgrounds!
Then came the more creative side of the sketchbook, my observations and testers! I tested different media from pencil and graphite to things like oil pastel and watercolour. I decided to stick with graphite because that helped to show details best.
One of my favourite pages is where I compared different colours of eyes! I was really pleased with how it turned out. Then for my alternative idea, I studied lips instead of eyes because they are still an interesting facial feature yet different. I enjoyed using lipstick to create the texture of the lips but I find lips a lot trickier than eyes!
I then chose a focus for my final piece. I decided to look at how the details of the eyes change throughout someone’s life and chose for this the Queen because her whole life has been documented in photos. I explained why I chose her and the meaning for the background, and then practised the four eyes I would use on my final piece – at the ages of one, twenty-seven, fifty and ninety.
My sketchbook finishes off with a plan for the ten hours of the exam (which it will be a miracle if I stick to) and an evaluation of all my work. Hopefully it will go well!
I’d love to hear your tips for art because I am always looking to improve! I am also planning on studying Fine Art at A-Level next year so let me know if you have any tips for that!
