Clay Clocks!

Round two of my Ceramics Club's clocks in clay... I had a super small group this Spring but it was super special and I think their ideas were very creative! :)

Bird Drawings and Watercolor Prints after John James Audubon

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not the first person to attempt to paint and describe all the birds of America (Alexander Wilson has that distinction), but for half a century he was the young country’s dominant wildlife artist. With nothing but a gun, artist’s materials and a young assistant, Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America’s avifauna, living a rugged existence as he floated down the Mississippi in the early 1820’s. His life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the Continent’s Romantic era. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, quickly eclipsed Wilson’s work and is still a standard against which 20th and 21st century bird artists are measured. Although he had no role in the organization that bears his name, today, the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over.
In this project, 8th graders used Audubon’s Birds of America, North American bird field guides and other library and reference books to first create an accurately rendered pencil drawing of a bird of their choice. Then they created a watercolor print based on their drawing. Here are the stunning finished products, followed by an explaination of the process:

To create a watercolor print, students first put a piece of plexiglass on top of their drawing and used liquid watercolors to create a colored watercolor painting on the plexi (they could see the outline of their drawing through the glass): To create the print, high quality cotton printing paper was soaked in water for half the class, and then pressed between dry papers.

The damp paper was placed on top of the plexi and covered in newsprint and felt, then run through the press three times:
The print is peeled from the plexi, creating the colorful print!Wet prints hang on the drying line:

Eat Your Colors!... Produce Color Wheels by 5th Grade

In this project, fifth grade art students learned about color mixing and painting techniques. Using only the primary colors (red, blue and yellow), students were able to create secondary colors (orange, violet and green) and tertiary colors (blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green and green-blue). In addition, students mixed each color with white and black to create the tint and shade of the color. Each fruit or vegetable in their color wheel shows one of the twelve colors in the color wheel, as well as the colors’ tint and shade!

LS Art Club Party and Cartouches

Yesterday was our last day of Lower School art club!!! First, we spent some time finishing our cartouche project... In ancient Egypt, kings, and sometimes others, encircled their hieroglyphic names with a design that we now call a cartouche. While it was rarely used to enclose the name of non-kings, for the most part, the cartouche's presence identifies the name it encloses as the king of Egypt. A cartouche is an oval ring that is a hieroglyph representation of a length of rope folded and tied at one end. It symbolized everything that the sun encircled and is thus an indication of the king's rule of the cosmos.

Lower School Art Club members became pharaohs themselves for this project, using their own name on the inside of a cartouche shape. Students used special wooden tools to emboss their names in hieroglyphics on pieces of thin aluminum, making them raised. They then painted a black ink over the surface and buffed it with steel wool to make it appear ancient and stone-like. Lastly, they painted their border a rich metallic color and wrote a secret message around it in hieroglyphics.












After we finished our project, we celebrated with WAY too many sugary treats!

Planting Flowers with Friends

Today during study hall, our Alliance partners (the 9th age girls classes) came over to the MS to help us plant flowers outside of the atrium. They look lovely and we had a great time hanging out with Ms. Williams' and Ms. Preston's classes!

Plaster Portrait Masks

These 8th graders' masks have been completed for a long time, but I have been hoping my last three students would get theirs finished soon... I thus waited to display and blog about them. It's becoming clear that they may never finish so I now bring you you these six self portrait masks in plaster!! You may remember the process they went through to actually create the mask from my earlier post.... After they were dry, students used acrylic paint to decorate the blank "canvas" of thier face with designs that represent some aspect of the individual artist, their personality or interests: