Ideas APart

An Array of Artwork by Jefferson County High School's First AP Art Class

Elizabeth Johnson

My works are mainly based on surrealism and anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is when animals are created with human characteristics. For example, I drew a girl with a body of a human and a face, ears and paws of a dog. However, this piece was not included in the gallery. I became interested in surrealism because surrealistic drawings allow me to express my thoughts and feelings into dream-like qualities and the content that I place into these drawings do not have to be realistic. I am interested in anthropomorphism because of my passion to draw animals and people. I have more difficulty drawing people so I decided to combine the two to get better at drawing both. The works that I have in the gallery demonstrate my ability to work with different types of media such as pastels, paints, and even paper towel.

My earliest creation in the gallery is not in either of the categories, surrealism or anthropomorphism. It is rather more of a realistic drawing a fruits. This piece demonstrates my use of pastels and blending pastels to make other colors. I began with four individual pastel drawings; a lemon, a strawberry, a peach, and a plum. I then put them all together into a collage to create one piece. My use of vibrant and colorful details was to capture the attention of my viewers and to create positive feelings. The final two pieces in the gallery are both based on surrealism.

The second piece, created from acrylic paint and a white colored pencil, is of a number two pencil with feathery wings flying through space above Earth. The meaning of this work was to show how the drawing utensil has plenty of "space" to draw and has the freedom of flight to go anywhere to draw in the entire universe. It was based upon my idea of how an artist should be free to an imagination.

My latest piece in the gallery was based upon a new type of art I discovered and found that I liked very well. This piece demonstrates my creativity just by simply using paper towel. I used the paper towel to cut different shapes and designs from, paint over them with water color, then pasting the designs onto paper making a surrealistic work of art.