Egyptian Cartouches

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.

Mural Update

My advisory has been working slowly but surely on the art room mural, every other week or so. Here is a photo of the little ladies working on the mural today and how it looks thus far... It's been pretty difficult for me to refrain from working on this myself, but I have yet to lay a paint brush on it. Pretty great so far, don't you think?

Turn Over a New Leaf

In this project, students combined and layered painting and printing techniques using fall leaves as the subject. Students chose an analogous color scheme to use for their piece; analogous colors are adjacent to one another on the color wheel, and strangely, almost all of the girls chose the same scheme of yellows, greens and blues. No one decided to use reds or oranges in their piece, which surprised me a little since those are the colors I think of when I think of fall leaves! Students used the rubbing, leaf mask stenciling and block printing techniques to create their compositions:

Coils, Coils and More Coils...

Seventh graders are in the middle of creating coil pots out of red clay that are inspired by ancient Greek black and red figure pottery. More details on that later, but here are a few shots of the girls rolling coils, then scoring, stacking and smoothing them to create tall vessels:

The Great Pumpkin

Here are the final charcoal drawings of pumpkins by the sixth grade class. Enjoy!

Color Wheel Accordion Books

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 page in their accordion book shows one of the twelve colors in the color wheel, as well as the colors’ tint and shade! These were really difficult to photograph since they are long and fold up, so here is just one picture I took of three of them laying out on the floor. In person, the are quite lovely!:

Rest in Peace Artie

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of the art room fish, Artie. He lived on my desk in a cheery two-gallon tank for over a year and brightened our days with his beautiful blue coloring and his energetic swimming... Goodby Artie!

Pumpkin Projects!

I LOVE FALL!!! As a result, I love using pumpkins, gourds, leaves (you'll see these in some projects coming up!), etc. in the art projects kids are doing at this time of year... Here are a few examples of some recently completed ones and works in progress.

Below are photos of the blown glass pumpkins created by the 8th graders on Wednesday. They turned out GREAT- these photos really don't do them justice- they are so delicate and beautifully colored:

Below are the clay pumpkins created by Ceramics Club and a few photos of them glazing the bisque pieces. These are on display along with the glass pieces in the 'pumpkin patch' that has become the glass display case!

Lastly, 6th grade artists are in the middle of drawing pumpkins and gourds from observation. We turn the lights off and shine a spotlight onto the still life to create interesting shadows and highlights. The goal of the project is to draw realistically from life and add a range of value to shade the piece and give the drawing depth. Here are some photos of them working on their drawings this morning during class: