Elective: Modern Mona Lisa

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!

Studio Art: Cubist Superheroes!

I am SOOOOO excited to share these paintings!  My Studio students did an AMAZING job on these and I'm so happy with them!  Everyone really tried their hardest, and even if they didn't necessarily do a full cubist representation of their superhero, they definitely put a lot of time and effort into these paintings!

I have shared this project on the SmARTteacher website so you can head over there to find the note page I used for Picasso, the rubric and objectives for these paintings, and my powerpoint that I created and used (though it is in PDF format because it's so large I couldn't upload it to the website).  I also shared some progress photos in an earlier post...

But without further ado...here are the finished paintings students have handed in!  Once the rest finish, I'll share those as well in a future post!  Students have spent a total of 10 days on these, from start to finish.  We spent one day discussing Picasso, a day drawing out our superheroes, 1-2 days adding acrylic modeling medium / acrylic coarse pumice medium to create texture on our canvases, 2-3 days painting backgrounds, and 3-4 days painting the superhero itself.

Again, here are what the project guidelines were:

Project Guidelines: 

☐ You must choose a superhero or villain to depict in the cubist style. 

☐ Your painting must depict the subject from at least the waist up. 

☐ The subject needs to take up at least ¾ of your canvas. 

☐ You must use full color and value in your painting. 

☐ You must show knowledge of the cubist style: 

~ Multiple view points 

~ Use of geometric shapes 

☐ You must unify your background with the subject.

I will say that this project was a struggle for some students...the students who like everything to be perfect!  It's ironic...a lot of them were complaining that doing the observational drawings were hard...I figured the cubist paintings would be easier because (a) I let them draw from a picture and (b) they were supposed to break their figures down into geometric shapes... Now, I know the cubism style wouldn't necessarily be easier (it's usually harder to do something simple so well) but I figured they'd be more apt and able to be able to simplify their characters...either way, I still think they did a great job fulfilling the guidelines of the project!