GCSE Art Sketchbook Tour [A* / Grade 9 FULL MARKS student || Pastel Inspire] (2024)

With a new set of Year 9s and 10s about to begin their GCSEs, I thought I’d share some some of my GCSE coursework and discuss a bit about my experience of GCSE Art. Many posts and forums online paint GCSE Art as a large amount of work with little gain, while in reality an open mind can go a long way; in my experience, GCSE Art taught me a lot about new approaches to art and allowed me to develop more as an artist.

I did GCSE Art & Design with AQA from 2015 to 2017, whereby my class had to cover at least two different projects with different media; my class chose to focus on fine art and ceramics. For my full GCSE Art sketchbook tour, please scroll down to the end of this article.

The first project we did was fine art and still life, where we primarily focused on fruit and skulls in our early lessons; this is an ideal starting point for students new to GCSE Art, as it really allows you to focus on improving your basic shading and proportion skills, which is really useful for a top grade at GCSE.

I really enjoyed this project and it is actually how I truly fell in love with painting flowers amongst other things, as I found that perfection was not the be-all-and-end-all, giving me the ability to sketch and paint liberally. Some of the pieces I used to hate in Year 10 are actually not that bad, seen in retrospect, since I am now less of a perfectionist in art. Sure, plenty of times I see mistakes in my work which should be fixed, but I have also learnt the lesson of not overworking my art, which can certainly happen.

Something really lovely about GCSE Art is how it teaches you to appreciate different artists and really forces you to study them, not just appreciate them. Doing artist studies and research into their styles was never really important to me until GCSE and this is an area where you can exercise a lot of freedom in terms of picking your own artists; initially, I chose YouTubers and artists I’d seen online, though eventually I started developing an appreciation for the more traditional artists. (For example, my EPQ, a research project undertaken alongside A-Levels, is based around the Impressionist Artists.)

Naturally, I am not one to work from light-to-dark, preferring to continuously jump between darker hues and white (I use a lot of white…). This meant that I really was not confident working on light surfaces with watercolours or other translucent media, and you can see from this early ink painting that I often ended up overworking so that the painting was too dark, due to clumsy, rash brushwork.

However, as I developed as an artist over the course, I began experimenting with techniques and found that methods such as stippling (shading with dots rather than consistent layers) allowed me to be more precise and cautious when painting, leading to this Year 11 mock artwork being one of my favourite studies to date. Development like this is a really rewarding part of GCSE Art, especially if you want to go on to study Art at a higher level or have interests pursuing it as a hobby.

Initially, I absolutely detested the GCSE ceramics project we did– in fact, I was so bad at clay-work, that my first “pot” completely sank and looked like a sad excuse for a bowl by the end of my first lesson. However, I really did grow into the project and allowed myself to learn from my mistakes, leaving my final ceramics piece to harden between layers of my coil pot, so it did not sink. I had a lot of issues with my clay pot as the art department even ran out of the key glaze I wanted, so I had to water it down for a less even result. I was so unhappy with the outcome for a long time but, looking at the photos and the finished result, I am actually quite proud of it.

Photography was also very new to me coming into Year 10, as I had rarely considered my composition in prior artworks. I must admit, I am still no natural at taking pictures, but GCSE really spurred me on to research art theory concerning composition, such as the rule of thirds and the Golden Ratio. This was never something I was interested in before I began taking photos for my final pieces but the more projects I did, the more I wanted to experiment with subjects being off-centre, or photos taken from above or below. With the ceramics project, some of my favourite photos are the ones where I was more adventurous with angle and perspective.

The most important thing to rememberfor GCSE is that you do not have to be the best artist in the world to get an A*. In fact, as long as you fulfil the Assessment Objective criteria (AO1-4), there is little emphasis on how much innate talent you have as an artist. Remembering the AOs is particularly important when it comes to art/artist analysis, as it is easy to describe the art or give a history of the artist, yet explaining and analysing is actually quite hard.

For some of my top tips for GCSE Art, you can find my article here.

For my top tips for paintings for GCSE Art, you can find my article here.

You can find my full first and second GCSE Art projects below:

Project 1: Still Life (Natural Forms)

Project 2: Ceramics (Organic Vessels)

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