Art Is Messy

Artists, particularly designers, have an eye for details. For those of you who noticed the huge amount of time between some of my posts, this little bundle of mushy cuteness is the reason why. Transferring from elementary school to high school this year, creating new courses from scratch and preparing materials for my maternity leave sub has kept me away from this blog for way longer than I would have liked. I’ve managed to steal a few moments within the past few days-or should I say late nights after the baby has gone to bed-to update my blog. My goal is to continue to post with some regularity. We’ll see in the coming weeks and months if little Elianna is agreeable to this. Keep your fingers crossed!

The second project that my Graphic Design students worked on this year was a cover design for our school’s yearbook. My Yearbook class came up with the theme “A Journey Through Time” since this is our school’s Centennial year. My Graphic Design Students were asked to created covers based upon this theme. Click here to see their finished examples.

My students just finished up a self portrait project. (Check back later for their *amazing* work.) In preparation for their final self portrait drawings, I gave a mid term exam in which students were asked to draw four examples of eye, ear, noses, mouths and hair. One out of the four drawings could be copied from a drawing book. The other three images had to be sketches of their own features  Click here to see their final sketches and here to see the instructions they were given for this assignment.

While this may look like your regular still life project, it is actually a family portrait. Students were asked to select objects that symbolically represent each member of their family. The drawings suggest the dynamics of their families through the drawing’s composition and color placement.

To see more examples of work from this project, visit the project gallery page. To read about the process that students were asked to go through and see handouts for this project, you may visit the lesson plan page.

My Art2 kids just finished their first assignment! I decided to start the year off with a paper relief project. Using only white drawing paper, scissors, blades and glue students were asked to create an abstract paper relief that represents their personal style of working on an assignment or coming up with an idea. You may click here to see their amazing work.

My graphic design students have just finished their project of the year. They did an AMAZING job!

We began the year by creating CD jackets. You can view the process that they followed, as well as the forms and rubrics that they used for this lesson by visiting the CD section of our class website. Be sure to check out the CD gallery to see their incredible CD Jacket designs.

It’s been a REALLY long time since I have posted to this site. I found out in January that I would be transferring up to the high school to teach Art 2, Graphic Design and Yearbook. Because I am a perfectionist, I have spent most of the time that I would normally use posting to this site, doing research for my classes.

Speaking of research, here’s a nice site that I came across while working on a project for my design class. It lists many of the major artists and movements that have influenced design starting from 1450. It a great quick resource for artist names and design styles.

This time, second graders looked at how Matisse combined images of plants and people into one composition. They then used water colors to create their own colorful paintings that included flowers, their friends and sometimes puppies!

My fifth graders completed their Doodle Box projects a few weeks ago. The project had mixed reviews. Two of my classes loved it, my third felt kind of luke warm about it. It’s amazing how the difference really showed up in their work!

Overall, the kids had a fun time using their imaginations to turn an ordinary box into something unexpected. My students had great difficulty, excuse the bad pun, thinking out of the box. (Yes, I really did say that.) Once they began the think creatively, their projects took off!

This post, and the ones that follow it, are a long time coming. I have finally decided to listen to my husband’s advice and not worry so much about preparing for my new high school classes so far in advance. This break from preparations has given me time to work on other fun things, like this blog!

So here we go…..

My first graders have been working so hard on the project below. For this project students looked at patterned still life images by Matisse. They then took a piece of cardboard and used acrylic paint to create their own patterned backgrounds. After, they used Crayola’s Model Magic to create flowers, leaves, bugs, stems and of course a vase. Finally they used a combination of tempera cakes and water colors to paint their three dimensional forms. The hardest part for them was to cover the white spaces. We talked a lot about how sometimes when you view art from the top, bottom and sides, you might notice something that you didn’t see while working on the front. For the finishing touches, a piece of yarn was hot glued to the back so that it could easily hang.