Personal Project Exhibition

My initial inquiry question was “How can I express my personality and culture through music and art?”. When I came up with this inquiry question, I thought that it was a great question that covers my personal project as a whole. When I checked it with my mentor for feedback on how I can improve my inquiry question, she said that the question is too specific and doesn’t really sound like a proper IB inquiry question. She suggested changing my inquiry question to “How do I depict music through art?”. This is more of an IB inquiry question and it fits really well with my personal project. 

The global context that I chose is Personal and Cultural Expression. I chose this global context because the songs that I chose relate to me personally and I created artworks representing my perspective on the song. I also included elements in all of my artworks that demonstrate Indian culture. For example, colors that have a certain meaning in Indian culture would be used in the artwork to help convey the message of the song.

I did a lot of research on the 3 different art mediums that I used in order to create my 3 artworks (graphite pencil, oil pastels, and acrylic paint) as well as the various art techniques used for these art mediums using mainly websites, articles, books. After that, I did some research on what effects these art techniques have on the viewer and the art piece itself so that I can have an idea of what art techniques I would like to use in my final artworks. In order to find this information, I interviewed my art teacher, Ms. Bronswijk, because she is an expert in this field and I also found more information in various websites, books, and articles. Lastly, I did some research on my Indian cultural background and how I can apply it in my artwork. I interviewed my mother, and I also found some helpful websites and articles that helped me collect a lot of information on this topic. 

A few obstacles that I encountered during the investigating phase of my project was that I originally planned to create 3 artworks using 3 mediums which were charcoal, watercolors, and acrylic paint. I already did a lot of research on these mediums and I was already ready to plan my artworks. But then, when I was trying out these mediums I realized that charcoal is a material that smudges a lot and it is quite difficult to create artwork using charcoal, especially since I have absolutely no prior knowledge of it. Instead, I decided to use graphite pencils instead because I have some prior knowledge of using HB pencils since I use it very often. I wanted to learn more about the other types of graphite pencils (2H, 2B, 3H, 3B, etc) and how I can use them in my artwork. I also decided to use oil pastels instead of watercolors because after doing research on their art techniques, I found out that both watercolors and acrylic paints have very similar art techniques. I wanted to learn about a variety of art techniques so I changed it to oil pastels because the art techniques are slightly different and I have hardly used this art medium before. I wanted to learn more about it.