In AP Art Studio, each student is required to choose a sustained investigation for the year, meaning each piece that the artist creates is focused around one driving idea or question. This allows students to create the art that they want and get creative with their ideas. For junior Dan Shelton, the freedom was an opportunity to start her passion project.
“I've wanted to do this for a long time but never had the motivation to actually start. My [sustained investigation] is focusing on the characters in a book I wrote, trying to show how they look realistically or show the most important characteristics about them. I’m trying to convey how they look and certain settings look because I realized that I’m not great at explaining exactly how they look and I want people to be able to see this is how I imagine it and this is how I want you to imagine it,” Shelton said.
Shelton wants her audience to be able to see exactly what she has created through her writing. By combining both her love for writing and her love for creating art, she found a way to fuse them together into one intricate and unique form of storytelling.
“I try to go through the story and randomly pick a chapter, I find the most important person in that chapter, and based on that I look at my past ideas of how to convey it. Like what I’m working on now, he’s the devil, his name is Stephan, and he’s an alcoholic which is great and that was the most important thing about him. I thought, 'how can I show this guy, because he only really has a couple scenes, he’s more of a background character,' so I showed him naturally. He’s sitting on a couch and it's different from the others, but it's who he is,” Shelton said.
The beginning of her journey in telling this story started by finding inspiration through a language art class.
“I hate saying this, but it started as a school project in 6th Grade. I had this class where we had little writing assignments with vocabulary words and it started as that. I had the first chapter, I changed the characters names after a while, but then I thought it would actually be a good story. Whenever I would take my dogs on a walk I would talk it out and when I got back I would try to write down everything that I thought of, and I kind of just went from there,” Shelton said.
When Shelton was younger she began to realize that the way she thought and processed some media differed from her peers. Through finding art, she found a way to communicate the things that only she can see, and feelings she is not able to put into words.
“I never really had a thing. Everyone had their thing, like you like the Warrior Cats books, or you liked horses, and I was like 'I don't really have anything.' My mom said, 'let's hire you an art teacher,' so I started getting into art and I love this. It’s very freeing. I’m not very good at conveying my thoughts and a lot of people don't understand my ability to see colors in music," Shelton said. "It helps me show people what they can't see."
The way that she has used her synethesia in her art has changed over the years due to experimentation. Shelton uses her synesthesia as another asset in her artist's tool box, though her ability to draw specific forms in exact replicas isn't as advanced, she has learned intricate details and secrets of color.
“It used to be I would listen to music while painting and it would just unconsciously flow into it, and I would always be confused because I was trying to do this but now I just let myself do it. If I have a certain idea I will start by drawing it out, like if I’m doing a person I will draw the face and then I'll turn on some music that I know matches it, and then the colors just work themselves in,” Shelton said.
Not only did synesthesia invite her into the world of art and expression, it's being utilized even now in her sustained investigation. Using the colors she sees in music, she ties certain songs to characters that correlate with those same colors.
“ Each character has a specific song where the lyrics match them, so I'll put it in their playlist a few times and just have a bunch of songs that have the right colors, and then I'll have their song that keeps coming up so I make sure to include little bits and pieces of that. Like one character that I’m doing next for AP Art, his color is purple, he wears purple a lot, and his song has a lot of purple in it. I know I’m going to have to put it in there a lot because the other songs that I want to use aren’t very purple. Each character’s specific song is the most important, and it helps get to know them more, because yes they’re my characters, but they’re also their own people and their songs help,” Shelton said.
Since the beginning of the school year she has had the opportunity to finish five pieces for her sustained investigation. Her favorite piece that she has done so far was the third piece she created about one of her main characters.
“The last piece I did, it was just the back of a person, AJ, a fallen angel. AJ is all dark, lots of red and brown, so I listened to a lot of Viking metal. It's very dark, there’s lots of browns and grays and It kind of worked itself in, it worked well. I thought that I got the pose and the colors just perfect, and they fit him, and I’ve never been good at skin color. It always turns out too orange, or pink, but I thought I nailed it for what I was trying to do,” Shelton said.
The way that AP Art Studio is structured has helped Shelton stay motivated and on top of her new pieces.
“I love that we don't have assignments, she [Lauren Sakowski] does not say you have to do this and this. I like that we have loose guidelines and deadlines, because I’m bad at setting deadlines for myself. And I like that we can do critiques. The very first time I hated it, but the critique is my favorite part because I can see what other people do and it gives me some inspiration when normally I would show someone they would simply say ‘oh that's cool’ and that would be all I got. Now I can get helpful comments, and I like that,” Shelton said.
Sharing her work has been a big part of the journey for Shelton. With the ability to have other artists look at her work, she has been able to learn more about her art as well as composition.
“It’s nice because my parents are usually the only ones who see my work and they try, but they’re not very artsy. So it's good having an art teacher say I like this, but you should try this instead, and I would be like ‘oh I didn’t think of that’ and it just gives me ideas that work better. Especially with other people's art I see their color schemes, and I see their styles and I sometimes never thought art could be like that, so it's kind of in the back of my mind when I start something else,” Shelton said.
Through AP Art Studio, Shelton is taking the book she is passionate about, and making it more interactive for her audience. Though originally it started out as a small project, with the addition of new pieces, she has become inspired to make it a much larger project.
“I didn't really have an end goal it was just I have this story set in my mind, I want people to be able to hear it because I thought it was cool, and after I finished it I went though and started to re-edit it, and I thought, 'you know what I want more people to read this.' I had a few friends and my parents read it and they were like, 'you should publish this.' This art class has been forcing me to think in depth about everything and it has me heavily adding bits and pieces that work better. I think if I finish the rewriting and the art I would like to try and publish it,” Shelton said.