Ah, hello summer vacation! Up here in Northern New York, most of our vacations began Wednesday or Thursday of last week...mine started at 10:45 on Thursday! So far, it's been off to a nice slow start...complete with a cranky teething baby! I just keep praying that it doesn't take ALL summer for these teeth to come through!
For the first half of summer, I'm going to catch up on all of the projects that were completed at school, but that I never had time to post about. My first catch-up post is from my Elective class. We did acrylic paintings of "Modern Mona Lisa". This was our second last project of the school year. With a class size of seven ladies (three seniors and four 10th graders), they were pretty slow moving on projects and it definitely took a lot of motivate them, even though they wanted to be there! I blame it on the smaller class size. Either way, this was one of their favorite projects of the year!
This was a simple project...the guidelines were that they had to think about women today and paint Mona Lisa today if da Vinci were around to do so. We spent a class practicing drawing faces using a proportion sheet to help get the feature placement correct. I taught them (or in some cases reinforced) the idea of painting from the background to the foreground. I also made them mix their own skin tone paint...something they thought was hard but they enjoyed the challenge. When I asked if I should buy skin tone acrylic for next year, they were outraged! "No! It's a good experience to learn how to do this on your own!" Just like we used for the cubist superhero project in my Studio class, my students used the various acrylic pumice gels, modeling mediums and gel mediums to create actual texture. I'll take it! :) Quite simply, here are their results!
