Art teacher vacation

I've been missing reading all my favorite art ed bloggers since during summer the pace is so much slower and life seems unrelated to the classroom. Summer vacation has been a welcome recharge to my batteries, but I kind of miss my kids and the business of being creative every day with them... On the other hand, I'm not the type to sit idle, so I've been recharging my batteries in other ways too.

First off- I finished a week long graduate course at Tyler on working with special needs children in the art room. It was an intense 5 day- 8 hours a day class jam-packed with information, artmaking, and discussion. I have some insight into some of the characteristics of specific disabilities and some practical tools to take back into the classroom with me next year. I got certified to teach right before the state changed requirements to include special ed coursework in art ed- so this class filled some gaps for me.

Secondly- I've been a Pinterest madwoman, collecting new ideas for my classroom management and projects so I'm not just recycling last year's ideas. If anyone is curious, here's a link to my rapidly increasing boards.

Thirdly, I've been making an effort to get out and see some art exhibits, like "Infinite Mirror"at the Michener museum in Doylestown. This was an amazing exhibit of artists all over the country exploring patriotism, identity, tradition, and family. I bought the catalog, and hope to use some ideas from their education guide for a project or two next year.

Fourthly, I've been experimenting with some printmaking ideas I'd like to try out with 4th or 5th grade next year:

 

This past spring my 5th graders used softcut blocks and linocut tools for their adinkra symbols, and I was very satisfied with their maturity and skill with the tools. I think a more ambitiously scaled relief cut project could work. So one idea is to do a 2 color reduction print of an animal. Above is my first layer including a frame and the shape of a peacock printed in turquoise. The white negative space between frame and bird was carved away. The outline of the frame is actually the complete size of the block. I made an edition of 8 on the first layer. Then I carved back into my block to create detail.

 I didn't have any plexi in the studio, unlike at school, but here's my setup for layer 2. My carved block is on a waste sheet of paper to catch any stray marks from the brayer, a clean brayer for printing is at center, along with water-based block-printing ink from Speedball, a wooden spoon as a printing option, and an inking plate and brayer. I think organization when printing is very important to reduce mess and keep things efficient.

Et Voila, my 2 color reduction relief print of a peacock. The only problem I foresee with this project is time. It would require a minimum of 4 class sessions for my students to complete something like this, and probably more like 5. Do I really want to dedicate that much time to it? Anyone have tips for doing this kind of project efficiently?

I'm teaching some art camps at Fleisher Art Memorial the next 2 weeks, and then headed to Montana for an artist-in-residence program. When I get back I expect to plunge into curriculum planning before school starts at the end of August. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer break!

1st grade Australian Dot Paintings

 My first graders had a lot of fun learning about the dot/dream paintings of native Australians. First we reviewed the continents and remembered that Australia is the only one to be both a continent and a whole country. I showed them a picture of Uluru, and thought about the climate and what kinds of animals lived there.

 We looked at a variety of native dream paintings, and noted that they often depict animals and abstract shapes. Students sketched on brown construction paper an Australian animal from a selection of examples I kept up on the board for inspiration. Then I passed out Q-tips for them to dot their colors on the page. They did a layer of white dots to outline all of their pencil lines first. I put only one color out at a time to help them keep their color areas organized and pace the painting a bit.

 The best ones have concentrations of color areas or patterning that help make their animal stand out from the background. On our last day we watched a quick animation of a dot painting and the kids compared and contrasted their paintings to the animation.

They did so well with it, I wonder if it would still work as well if we made bigger paintings next year? These are only 9x12 and they filled them in really quickly. They loved dotting the paint on the paper, and I was amazed at how meticulously some of them worked.

2nd grade Oaxacan-inspired sculptures

At the beginning of the school year as I unpacked all the goodies in my new art room I could not BELIEVE how many boxes of wood shapes I found, both left over from the previous year and on my hand-me-down supply list from the previous art teacher. I couldn't imagine how so much wood could possibly be used in one year. I put a dent in the boxes with a mobile project I did with 2nd grade early in the year, but now we've nearly demolished the wood supply with our latest project: Oaxacan-inspired wood animal sculptures.

 It's so hard to choose photos to share, because their sculptures all have so much character. We started off by examining examples of Oaxacan wood sculptures- especially how the forms, colors, and markings of the animals were exaggerated from real life. We considered adaptations an animal needs to live in an environment and selected features from known animals to create an imaginary animal. Students drew a sketch of what animal they would like to create to finish off the first art-looking and art-planning day.

 On the second day, we pulled out the wooden shapes and noticed their forms- most of which were in the cylindrical or rectangular prism category. I asked students to pull out pieces and play with the arrangement of forms a bit before deciding how to construct their animal. They were also asked to pay attention to how their pieces connected- the more surface area touching between 2 pieces, the stronger the attachment would be. We used tacky glue for this step because I shouldn't find where I hid the wood glue!

 On the third day I asked students to choose 1-2 colors to paint a base coat on their sculpture. After 3 classes of messily painted sculptures, I limited the 4th class to ONE base color! On the fourth day we looked at the Oaxacan sculptures one more time to remember how they were decorated. This time we used skinny brushes and added pattern details like stripes and polka dots. We thought about how some animals try to blend in to their environments with camouflage colors and some animals have warning colors to show they are poisonous.

On our final work day, students had an opportunity to add some final details with feathers, beads, googly eyes, and sequins. They were asked to be RESTRAINED in their choices and not go overboard with the doodads. They also created a written description and a drawing of their animal in its environment to serve as a label for their sculpture when they go on display. Their written description had to include what animals they combined, three things their sculpture had, and explain how their sculpture was or was not like Oaxacan sculptures
This project is a real winner- students got to work in 3 dimensions and use a lot of creative problem-solving as well as connect to concepts in science.  The process and product are nicely balanced, and the final pieces are amazing!
 PS. For good photos of sculptures, hang a piece of black construction paper so it is half on the wall, half on the table and place the sculpture on top.

Still Life projects

We're working through genres in art class. The second and fourth grades just completed still life projects with water-color resist. 

Second graders drew an animal toy from observation and added a shadow, a table line, and a wall pattern. They colored their animal by blending oil pastels then painted the backgrounds in watercolor.

The 4th grader made an imaginary still-life by stacking ellipses to make a "crazy vase" shape. They shaded the sides to make the vase look rounder and colored in a shadow. Afterwards, they painted their wall and table with watercolor.

My favorite ones were when the students blended colors on the paper, blue over red... green over blue... purple over orange. The layered colors made moodier paintings.

Next up we'll expand our drawing skills with some observational drawing.

And I'd better come up with some more still-life ideas for 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades.

Eric Carle Kinder Collages

After looking at Eric Carle's ABC animal book, Kindergartners learned how to make painted textured papers with spots, stripes, and scratches to prepare for an animal collage project. Then we talked about all the different places animals can live. The kids thought about forests, jungles, grasslands, zoos, oceans, ponds, farms, and even in our houses! They drew a background habitat for their animal first. Then we practiced tearing paper and using our imaginations to make animal shapes from torn paper.Finally, we tore our good painted texture paper to create an animal collage a la Eric Carle.

 One boy was very original and did a penguin who lived in the arctic (we hadn't come up with that one as a group!) I'm not sure if that's a person or another penguin sliding down the iceberg in the background. It looks like he drew some wind to show how cold it was, and even a fish for his penguin to eat!

 You may not have heard of green cows before, but that's what this one is. There's also a chick at the bottom and some birds hanging out on the fence in this farm scene. I think this girl also discovered that coloring big areas goes faster if you use the side of a peeled crayon.

This one is a very big tiger hanging out by a stream.
This project had great diversity in the finished pictures. The kids had a lot of choice, and were really able to envision animal shapes from their torn paper. It was remarkable to see how much they already knew about animals and habitat as they did this project. Animal drawings seem more developed at this age than people drawings. I wonder why that is. All four of my Kindergarten classes went at this in different ways. Some felt anxious about trying to tear a specific shape and wasted a lot of time, while another class finished the background and collage zippity-zip in one session. Our next project is going to build off the shapes idea for a quick "still-life" drawing.