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The band Ok Go is a favorite among art teachers for their clean lyrics and innovative music videos. They make use of optical illusions and perspective tricks. I like to show students their work to question, 'what is art?'.
Optical Illusions...More Egg-cellent Art!At Easter time many of us paint Easter eggs together with our families. The Easter egg is a symbol of the Risen Christ and the Resurrection. Out of the tomb comes new life, just like an egg and a chick hatching. Artists have been painting images of Christ and Easter symbols onto their eggs for many centuries. Below are some contemporary artists that create many different types of art on their eggs!
Students at All Saints will be participating in an art auction where I and students will decorate furniture pieces, create prints, make paintings which will be made into photo collages, and more. More information will be posted about this so please keep checking in for more news! At this time art might be a little slower coming home but I will return work to students as soon as I can.
Students at both All Saints and St. James are creating art for Easter. Some students created their own designs while other students are creating decorated Easter eggs. Students were instructed to incorporate an aspect of Easter into their artwork, this could be an Easter egg, Jesus, the Easter Bunny, etc. The Broome County Catholic Schools were featured in an art show at Binghamton City Hall. K-12 students were selected to have pieces in the show. Due to space restrictions only a select group of work was displayed. Work will be returned after Easter Break. Now that the new blog is up and running I thought I would get caught up with posting past artwork. Students at both St. James and All Saints created winter artwork to grace the hallways and for the holiday concerts. Here are examples of some of the work.
Grades 4-6 at St. James were taught about Vikings and how they were famous for being fierce warriors, traveling on their longships. Their ships were designed to scare off sea monsters and people alike. They were early pirates, traveling from town to town along the coasts looking for goods. The name Viking came from the Scandinavians themselves, from the Old Norse word "vik" (bay or creek) which formed the root of "vikingr" (pirate). -History.com Students examined images of Viking helmets, weaponry, and ships and began to construct their sketches which they will later use pen and ink techniques to add definition and detail with. Students created drawings of what the Vikings seemed like to them. Many drew Vikings with horned helmets, this idea actually started in the 1800's when artists drew Vikings in their paintings with such helmets on, to date there are no artifacts that would suggest Vikings had horned helmets. Other students chose to draw dragons due to the shape of many Viking boats. For More Viking Facts Visit History.Com
Students in both 5th grade and the 6th grade classes at All Saints have now begun their sculptures based off of the concept of Alberto Giacometti's work. One class used aluminum foil for their armatures whereas another used pipe-cleaners. The results are different but yet still similar. We focused on making strong foundations for our sculptures, this is called an armature (or the skeleton), we then carefully laid plaster strips over the armatures and smoothed out the layers. Wrapping the plaster strips, some of the sculptures now look like mummies, this will change once details are added and they are painted :). I didn't have students smooth out their work too much due to the textural quality of Giacometti's work. So far students are having a lot of fun!
Day 2-4th GradeWe are creating the backgrounds for our Frederic Remington horses. Using magazines we are constructing collages of settings which the see-through horse drawings will be placed on top of. We will then use watered down glue to seal the top.
We are currently in the process of working with Seton Catholic Central High School to purchase a kiln for next year. In preparation for this change in our curriculum we are having students create sculptures with Plasticine, an oil-based clay that does not dry. This will also be available to students from now on for their 'free time' after and in between assignments while we wait for the rest of the class to catch up. The clay is harder then Playdoh consistency and as such is a great exercise in hand strength and fine motor skills.
First grade students were instructed to initially create Leprechauns, in their own vision. Students added hats if they thought that Leprechauns would wear hats. After all of the students created their Leprechauns they were able to free create. They came up with lots of great ideas! In class I strive to not produce just 'pretty' art but to have a concept or technique built upon. Students are told in class that I do not care how their artwork looks but how much effort they put into it. I would much rather have a student try for months to work hard on a drawing and have it look 'terrible' then to have a masterpiece done in a few minutes. When people work hard on anything it becomes a part of them, they earned the final results through all of the work they put in. Any skills are not learned overnight, it takes time to develop them. I want to teach students patience, skill, and value through their art. Each lesson I teach is a student by student basis, some students need more of my help while others need me to step back and allow them to stumble and fall and problem solve on their own. Learning is about trial and error, making mistakes is part of the process. Grid drawing is a technique that allows some students a greater ability to draw more accurately. Using the grid to replicate what an artist sees we are able to produce similar results or enlarge the object we are drawing. Even the Egyptians used grids to scale their drawings to carve into stone.
Chuck Close was born on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington. Suffering from severe dyslexia, Close did poorly in school but found solace in making art. After earning his MFA from Yale in 1964, Close took his place atop the American art world by creating large-scale, photo-realist portraits that have creatively blurred the distinction between photography and painting. -Biography Everyday I am reminded how much I love my job and how wonderful all of my students are! Thank you for being you!
Kindergarten and 1st grade students at All Saints began finishing up their Kandinsky circles today! They will be going home next class. We began working on this pastel drawings many weeks ago however the weather and mid-winter break got in the way, but we're excited to get back to them now! Kandinsky is a great artist to study when learning that anyone can do art. Students folded their papers in half three times to make the rectangles they will draw their circles in. We then began making dots in each rectangle in different colors, later adding more rings before coloring the backgrounds. St. James first grade students learned about the artist Miro while creating creature rough drafts which we then translated into a finished drawing. We will be painting these next class using the wax resist technique. We examined Miro's use of shape and line, students also learned a new vocabulary word, 'organic shape'! Many of Miro's shapes are constructed from organic lines. We viewed a PowerPoint of an assortment of his work then began creating our sketches using Miro's style but our own imaginations!
Students at St. James School learned about the drawing technique of gesture drawing. This method allows students to slowly examine the body and positions while drawing simple shapes to display what they see. We broke down the shapes in the body to their simplest form. Each student took approximately 2-3 minutes to model for the class, everyone did a wonderful job! Students at All Saints School briefly learned about the artist Alberto Giacometti and his abstract figures before creating their own figures depicting motion and movement. We began construction using aluminum foil to build an armature to apply the plaster strips to. Using small pieces of plaster allowed for easier use and getting into small spaces. After we cleaned up our work areas we viewed a slideshow of Giacometti's work, one of which is rumored to have sold at auction for $100 million dollars! Next class we will finish plastering before we begin to think about adding details. Fourth Grade at All Saints SchoolToday students at All Saints participated in a VTS (Visual Thinking Strategy) art lesson learning about the American artist Frederic Remington. Students were shown a PowerPoint of several of his paintings and sculptures and were asked a series of prompts, allowing the students to hypothesize story and meaning through examining the artwork. "Through VTS' rigorous group 'problem-solving' process, students cultivate a willingness and ability to present their own ideas, while respecting and learning from the perspectives of their peers. Engaged by contributing observations and ideas, the students participate in VTS-based lessons in ways they often don’t in others. VTS is a curriculum for schools; as a method of discussion, it is used in many art museums". -Visual Thinking Strategies Students used the grid system of drawing to break down one of two images of a horse. The grid system has been used by artists for hundreds of years to break down a large image into smaller more manageable parts to allow for more realistic representation. Egyptians even used this method! The grid system also allows artists to enlarge images easier, by simply keeping the right ratio and making one grid larger an artist can enlarge any image. Students used a blank grid underneath see-through vellum type paper, while examining the squares on the horse drawing grid, copying what they saw. We will create a collage during the next class where students will take torn magazine images and compose them into a scene. We will take the drawings from the previous class and attach that to the new collage. Through this students will also learn about mixed media art.
Welcome to the new website and blog! I have been struggling to find a means of uploading information and images quickly so that I may share it with all of you as soon as possible. I am hoping to update this blog almost daily with posts to keep everyone updated on what is happening in the art rooms. As I work at two schools I will do my best to update about each. I will post photos from class however I do not post pictures of students for safety reasons, you will never see anyone's face here. If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to contact me!
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