Time for the first challenge! This challenge asked me to reflect on my own arts and creative history – a big task for me as I have been living and breathing the arts for most of my life. My personal creative journey has been demonstrated through my river journey pictured below. I identified the different moments throughout my life and how the arts have played a role in them. I have always had a creative outlet whether it be music, drama or art and found them to be the highlights of each stage of my journey. I enjoyed this activity as it allowed me to self reflect on my own experiences with the arts and think about how I can use these experiences to inform my teaching.
Upon completion of my River Journey, I needed to summarise my story in six words. I thought about the fact that I have been creative for most of my life, both on stage with performing and singing and off stage with my interior design and private performing arts teaching. So I decided not to overthink it and go with ‘Always creative – on and off stage’. I feel those 6 words sum up my experience with the arts and how they play a role in my life. Without even trying, I experience creativity almost every day. I find it keeps my mind active and ensures that I am always exploring and finding ways to express myself. Whether it be Instagram (I curate my feed to ensure it has a consistent theme, thats my perfectionism talking), home decorating, teaching singing, rehearsing for musicals or even routine activities like doing my hair and makeup or taking photos of my dog (she has Instagram too and is much more famous than I’ll ever be), I am always exploring my creativity.
Now I needed to create a self portrait. I’ll be honest, I haven’t put a pencil to paper and drawn a picture for a very long time. I consider myself to be a pretty capable artist when it comes to drawing etc, and hoped that those senior Art classes in high school were still imprinted on my brain. I actually found this activity very enjoyable. I had forgotten how relaxing it is to just experiment with a pencil, paper and some colours. When I was first looking at this task, I had this idea to try and incorporate the dramatic faces into my portrait. You know, one side happy and one side sad? Then when I looked at Picasso images for inspiration I found that that’s basically the essence of his artistic style anyway so that was lucky! I started by drawing the image with pencil, and then used colours to jazz it up. Here’s the final product below.
Finally, I needed to design a book cover that incorporated my self portrait and six word story to creatively introduce myself to my class. I uploaded my portrait onto the computer and did some fiddling. I wanted to incorporate performing so added a stage background. I added my 6 word story and name and viola! Here’s the final product.
I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge as it prompted me to reflect on my own creative journey and inspired me to create something new. I am very much looking forward to continuing to explore through the next challenges!
Mrs Sweetapple's Classroom 
I loved reading your Arts journey, as it has given me a greater insight into your passion for the Arts. I like how you have incorporated warm and cool colours (red and pink, blue and purple) to contrast with the two colours (yellow ā warm and blue- cool) of the face.
LikeLike
This is very creative and informative. Wow, you really do have an extensive history in the arts. This will be an interesting subject for you and a wonderful career. I was fascinated by how creative you are from singing and drama to your creative Instagram pages. I love the clear, crisp lines in your self-portrait, and it fits perfectly with the Picasso style. Finally, it was so clever to place your self portrait on the stage. I love the way you have the lighting shining out to the audience, and have the cut-out of your portrait looking out at the audience. This perfectly represents your talents. Only thing that would have made this even better would be to have your famous little dog on stage with you š
LikeLike