Adventures in printmaking

 

Printmaking is one of my favorite things to teach. My eighth graders are using their selfies as a subject, while the seventh graders each chose an animal to place in an environment.  They are just about finished, so the final results are coming soon.

Contour line hands and color theory

With all of the snow we had this quarter, I ended up having to break their drawings into smaller shorter projects.  I really like to have thier drawing and color theory projects be larger, but we were at the mercy of the weather this quarter.  Our first venture into countour line occured with hand drawings and color scheme collages.

We then went directly into using mannequins to draw forms in space with value.  We used graphite for the shading and thier main task was finding how the values could create round forms on a flat sheet of paper.

Fancy Coils

How many ways can a clay coil be manipulated to design an interesting pot? The seventh grade students created coil pots and used low fire glazes to complete the pots.  Our emphasis was on design and sticking with a plan during the process. 

We found the Zen in Zentangles

These were really fun. So much so that some kids made two! I have recently come to the conclusion that the elements and principles of design are not the end all be all of Visual Arts learning and that writing the definitions of them isn't really learning.  By making these zentangles we discussed and applied most of the E's and P's in a creative way.  

A different kind of self portrait.

The seventh grade did so well on their self portrait projects.  I have been working on having the students use more of their personal voices, so I allowed them to guide how they organized their work to represent who they are and their personal interests.  Some of the students were very inventive in what they came up with and I learned a lot about them too!

Perspective Line Practice Drawings

This week the sixth and seventh grade eagles practiced using linear perspective to show deep space on a flat surface.  Though they each had a basic model to follow, you can see how some students really took off with the tool.  They will use the skills learned with these drawings in their first project, Mexican retablos.

Multi- media Still Life's

The seventh and eighth graders created these drawings using graphite, color pencil, oil pastel, and collage. I set up a huge still life around the room and they worked from the still life to see the values and details.  Working and manipulating the media was our focus, I think they did pretty well. 

I got the idea for this project from another art ed blogger http://calvertcanvas.blogspot.com .