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.

Abstraction

I found out that a couple of my students didn't understand the term Abstract so I devoted a whole week to it. We started with a drawing of one of our art room tools and then distorted it in three subsequent drawings until it was totally non-objective.

Collage Color Wheel

I've had my students do color wheels before so I wanted to change it up. This project was really successful and students did an amazing job with the color matching.

Shoes

My students love talking about shoes. Air Jordon's and Air Force Ones seem to be the two classroom favorites, although some of our female students also had some impressive illustrations of some high fashion high heels.

PVC Pipe Drawings

Instead of giving students more complex still life's, I felt that they would be more confident and more successful if I gave them simple shapes to work with. The PVC pipes I got were excellent. More confident students were able to make and draw more elaborate sculptures and the less confident ones were able to start by drawing just a few basic forms and then add on to them as they got more skilled.

Vocabulary Posters

My arts literacy integration class has been reading the book Out From Boneville by Jeff Smith. I had seen word walls in elementary settings and I found out one of our language arts teachers has been using them with our high school students. I decided to borrow the idea but I decided to add in some elements of graphic design as part of the assignment. Instead of including the word, its definition and an illustration and throwing them together higgledy piggledy, I required them to demonstrate some type of hierarchy in their poster design. I included an illustrated example from our text, which I think I may make part of the assignment in the future. 

Speech Balloons and Pop Art

This project was really popular with students. As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching a class on graphic novels and comics. For this project, I reviewed how comic artists draw speech balloons differently to express the emotion of a piece of dialog or the personality of the speaker. We spent a short period of time talking about Pop Art and how artists like Roy Lichtenstein used images from comic books to create fine art paintings. Then I gave students a list of onomatopoeias and guided them through selecting art elements, lettering and compositions that would suit the word of their choice. Finally we created paintings and drawings of our speech balloons.

Here is an excellent Documentary on Lichtenstein. I thought it was too long to show in class but in another time and place it might be useful. It's a bit gimmicky but they interviewed a wide range of people and explained Lichtenstein's artwork in a way that was really accessible.

Mono-print Paintings

This is an adapted form of mono-printing that uses plastic ziplock bags. A lot of my students like to work really tight and neatly and I thought this was a good way to get them out of their comfort zone and loosen up.

Collage

This quarter, I've been lucky enough to work with local artist Keegan Xavi. She did some amazing work with the students and consequently I've been thinking a lot more about collage. 

This technique is a little different from what she usually does. I tend to use more geometric shapes which give it more of a mosaic look. I also encouraged students to draw some kind of basic design to start off to give their finished pieces a little more structure. 

Leaf

For this project I had students draw from observation. I tried to really encourage the students to include flaws, tears, holes and imperfections in the leaf. 

Superheros

One of the classes I'm currently teaching is an Arts Literacy integration class. After doing some experimenting during the first quarter, I've decided to focus the class more closely on comics, graphic novels, and illustration. This project was for a unit on characterization. Students were given xerox's of a wide assortment of Marvel superheros and were allowed to collage them together and color them to create their own characters. Afterwards we completed a short writing assignment that included inventing appropriate backstories, motivations, and goals for our characters.

Collage Portraits

Perspective

International Baccalaureate

Portraits