Studio Art: Cubist Superheroes

Well, I can officially say that this 5-year teacher has made a rookie mistake...she has spread herself too thin this year.  Between the business of being a K-12 teacher in one building, being on a scheduling committee, the negotiations team for our new contract, being on a report card committee to revamp report card comments, working the extended day program after school, AND starting a new business venture this year, I have reached a point where I have taken on too much.  Unfortunately, my blog has suffered because of it. :(

These are some of the cubist superheroes that my Studio Art classes completed this year.  We finished these in the middle of February, and since done a printmaking project, soon to come.  You can check out the objectives of this project, which are the same as last year, on this previous post.  Again, we used the coarse pumice and modeling mediums to create actual texture on our canvas. 

Similar to last year, the students that were extremely successful at this project were the students who had a hard time with the realist projects, and the students who favor the realism projects, struggled with this project.  Next year, I'm going to change up the subject matter for this project...I just haven't figured out what it will be yet.

Summer Program: Week 2

My goal this year for the summer program was to come up with some quality art and crafty projects that would take the kids more than one day to complete.  The last two years we did the program over summer, we did great on that planning aspect for the first two weeks, and then for the second two, the students went home with cheap crafts that they probably lost at home.

So, for the second week, we made those 3-D cardboard letters.  I did this with the younger students for two reasons...(1) to see if this project was more elementary than high school and (2) to see how well they would handle the X-acto knives for future reference!  All in all, I think we had two bleeders total throughout the entire project!  A few students were able to make their letters super crisp...even more so than some of the high school students when they did the project!

We started by building the letters first...the same way I had my Studio Art students create them for the Master's Paintings.

Next, they picked a single color to paint the entire letter...

 And lastly, we splatter painted them!  I have always wanted to do splatter painting with the students to learn about Jackson Pollock, but I know that a student will come to school in their best clothes during the school year despite how many warnings I may send home...

To make the paint we splattered with, I took acrylic and added acrylic gloss and a little bit of water to get a more drippy paint.  We set the cups up on the sidewalk outside of all the colors with a brush, and the students came up one at a time to choose their colors to paint with. 

 I had the students line up outside in the grass, an arms length apart so they would splatter each other!

To ensure we didn't make a huge mess and splatter the side of the building, I had the students dip their brush in the paint and then wack it against their finger to get it to splatter.

 They still got messy...but they loved it!  Their legs were a work of art all on their own! ;)

A few finished paintings from day 1 of splatter painting...we had a few rainy days in between so students finished the other sides a few days later.

And finally...a few of the final products!

 I think that this proves that the 3-D cardboard letters could be done easily with elementary age students as well as high school...the hard (or easy part) for the desired grade level is all on how you have them treat the surface.  Oooh!  A great idea just came to me!  My elective this upcoming year is sculpture...I wonder if I could get my sculpture students to create letters in the shape and style of an object...i.e. a "P" for pencil that looks like it's made out of big pencils!!!???

Summer Program: Keith Haring Murals

Once again this year, we worked on expanding the Keith Haring-style murals we did the last two years.  This summer was most likely the last summer that we will receive the grant to do the summer program, and we had three panels left in the hallways at the little gym, so we decided to do three murals instead of one!

Needless to say, we didn't quite finish, so I will post the the final, touched up murals once school starts.  I plan on taking the painters who pay more attention to details to finish it up.  We had a lot of great painters this summer, but they started to trickle out of attendance and I was left with, well, the over-eager painters who didn't necessarily pay attention to paint drips on the floor and such.  Either way, I think we accomplished quite a bit for tackling three panels at once!

On Day 1, I drew out a beach scene and we started painting with Chroma Acrylic Mural Paint.

Day 2 continued with the beach scene, and I also added a winter scene and of course a hiking scene...because you can't live at the base of the Adirondacks without making art with mountains! ;)

The other two murals, which can be seen on "Our Completed Murals", were flat color.  For the beach scene, we decided to get a little more fancy and added some cool color blending in the big wave as well as sponge texture for the sand.

I think the beach mural is by far my favorite one of the entire group!  This one just needs a few black lines touched up and the sand redone.  We had some drips and when the student repainted over them, she didn't sponge the sand on the same way as she did the first time.  :-/

Again, these ones just need some touch up on the black lines and then the top coat of non-glossy acrylic.

Studio Art: 3-D Master's Paintings (Picture Heavy Post!)

These 3-D painted letter "Master's Paintings" were the last projects done by my Studio Art classes this year.   I posted a long while back about the process they used to put these together...cardboard boxes, paper towel tubes, and masking tape.  They applied gesso and then drew and painted their chosen painting on the surface.  I'd say about 2/3 of the students took their projects home at the end of the year, and I kept the rest to start decorating my high school room to make it more "mine"!

Kandinsky

Picasso

Can't remember the artist...it was taken out of an old art book.

Van Gogh..I love this one!

A Monet...and she did an amazing job on this one!

I did allow one Jackson Pollock from each class...

I believe this one was a Renoir.

Magritte

Dali

The Scream!

Another VanGogh and another really great one!

Can't remember...for some reason I want to say this one was a Constable but I don't think that's right...

Hokusai

Can't remember... :(

Van Gogh

Keith Haring!

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!