Playgrounds

I got the idea for this project from Art Room 104, who in turn got it form K-8 Art.  In K-8 Art,  the instructor precut the shapes for them, and both teachers gave the students only primary colors. I chose to have students use their choice of colors from my scrap bin. On day one, I asked students to use familiar shapes, squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, and then on the second day I talked about weird shapes and showed them leaves and blobs. A lot of the students had trouble realizing that these were also shapes. They were really attached to the idea that if it didn't have a name, it wasn't a real shape. 

Tissue Paper + Water

Negative Space

One of the things that I noticed about our abstract drawing projects was that students tended to keep the object in one big lump in the center of the page. I'm planning on revisiting that project later in the quarter after addressing this and a couple of other issues. To teach them about negative space I showed them two images of decagons. One regular and one in the star shape. I explained that the star is more interesting because it has the points breaking out into the negative space. Then we used scissors to cut different shapes out of a square and then mounted them so that they broke outside of the square and into the negative space. I think this might have been a little simple for high school student work but it demonstrated the idea really well and it seemed to click with the students so I'm hopping this will make a big impact on their subsequent drawings.

Coral Reefs

It's amazing what you can do with just cut paper. The challenge of this project was that students had to make a 3D project with materials usually used for 2D work. 

Eric Carle Illustrations

Monet's Waterlilies