Voices of Emerging Artists
by Isabelle Colantuonio
Technical Skills Learned in my Second Semester of Art School
As I have started my second semester at Lesley University, I have been taking more technical art classes, and this has greatly improved all of my skills, from color theory to composition and helped all formats of my art. The classes that have most contributed to this change are Drawing Intensive, Introduction to Painting, and 3D concepts, all required first-year classes at my university. Through the school requiring these classes I have had experience with these strong technical skills while also being able to combine them with my game design classes to create a strong basis of skills to take to my next few years of classes.
The first best example of how I have been able to improve my technical skills is from learning the process of drawing with diagramatic lines and using these to accurately represent scale in my art. Throughout my drawing class we have drawn various items from different points of view to pratice these skills, and through each of my drawings my skills have improved and gotten much stronger. I have learned how to use these lines to help my other work as well, whther it was seeing relationships between objects in my paintings, or using imaginary diagramatic lines to relate two objects together when I am 3D modeling. This application of my technical skills has allowed my art to become more accurate but has also allowed me to understand space and relationships even better.
Another strong example of the technicals skills I am learning is learning applications of color theory in my Introduction to Painting class. Throughout this class we have started with a series of still lifes with various objects to paint. For each still life we have to hand mix each color and decide composition on the page. From this, both my color matching and color theory skills have gotten stronger. I use my color theory skills to get the image to have a cohesive tone while also identifying the objects in space. Mixing specific colors has also become very useful because I have been able to use the makeup of every color to understand how to blend shadows into objects while also balancing out the entire color pallet of the image.
These basic technical skills are all working together to give me a really strong foundations, the main purpose of the schools foundation year curriculum, but also allows me to be more prepared for my future game design classes. This also allows me to become a better artist because these skills make sure I understand the concepts behind the art I am creating. Overall this program has been extremely beneficial after my first year of college and will be beneficial in future years as well.
