During this project I improved my skills with an xacto knife. I had used an xacto knife before in middle school art, but not on a major piece of artwork. I learned how to cut sharp curving lines by turning the paper or the knife to get it exactly the way I wanted it to be. I also learned how to cut in confined or thin spaces, especially on the drums of the piece. I made sure not to rush so the paper would tear as little as possible and used the original lines on the drum as a guide for cutting the squares.
I responded to challenges pretty well as I worked. The most challenging part was cutting the black paper because it was time consuming and very detailed. I rushed a little bit at the beginning and the paper teared some on the outline of one of the drums. After that though I went slower and as a result there were no major tears and the cutting went really well. The only other difficult part was gluing the music notes into the squares on the drum because they were so tiny. I had to be careful and try to get as little glue on the white paper as possible though some got on it anyway but that was inevitable. I dealt with challenges well and they did not stop me from feeling good about the final product.
I considered most of my ideas before I tried them. All of planning, the drawing, and tracing went really well. The only time I didn't really think about what would happen was the music notes and their size. I had to cut out the notes from the black paper because they weren't connected to anything else in the piece. I then had to glue them on separately after I had glued the rest of the piece down. This was the only problem I really had with my ideas and thinking about what would happen.