Mannequin Drawings from Observation

Students do accurate drawings from observation that focus on value in art during their sixth grade year. The first three quarters of this year, students drew pumpkins and gourds, their shoes, and their hands in sign language. This quarter, my students drew poseable wooden mannequins, but with a little twist that turned out beautifully! Rather than have the kids use graphite and charcoal to render the medium and dark values of their object, they used white charcoal on black paper this time and focused on drawing the highlights, leaving the shadows the color of the paper. Only a handful of kids have finished (the rest will finish on Monday), but I wanted to post about it before the year is over!

Cardboard Collagraph Quotes

Collagraphy is a printmaking process in which materials are applied to a rigid surface (such as paperboard or wood) essentially creating a raised surface that will be inked and printed (unlike the kind of relief printing we do in fifth grade, where we carve into the plate). Many different materials can be used to create the raised surfaces/textures such as sandpaper, leaves and other natural objects, yarn and glue, but we used chipboard, a dense, thin, cardboard-like material. For this project, 8th grade students were challenged to think of a quote, poem or saying that was personal or meant something to them. They were asked to write their quote using a font and letter arrangement that would reinforce its meaning. Students cut their letters out of the board with scissors and Exacto knives:

 Since printing always creates an image that is backwards from what you see on the plate, we had to make sure our words were glued down backwards to get a correctly oriented print. We accomplished this by coating a fresh piece of chip board with a spray adhesive and pressing it onto the arranged letters:

 ... followed by a coating of acrylic medium to keep the chipboard from soaking in too much of the moisture from the printing ink and deteriorating:

 Students then chose colored inks that also "reinforced" their quotes and inked their plate before running them through the press:

 Here are the final works!

Sumi-e Painting

Sumi-e is a style of painting that is characteristically Asian, and has been practiced for well over a thousand years. Literally ink painting, it is an art form that strives to distill the essence of an object or scene in the fewest possible strokes. Corresponding to their study of Asia in history and geography, fifth grade artists recently participated in a Sumi-e brush painting workshop withlocal artist, Joan Lok. Mrs. Lok taught the students the basic strokes to create bamboo and cherry blossom paintings. The girls spent many periods practicing their techniques and eventually worked toward final artworks on rice paper. These are of bamboo, and now the girls are working on cherry blossoms!  

Self Portraits inspired by Chuck Close

When I was in New York in March for the NAEA Convention, I had the very exciting opportunity to see contemporary American artist Chuck Close speak. His lecture inspired me to spice up my usual 7th grade portrait project and attempt a painted piece like his. Close has been a leading figure in contemporary art since the early 1970s. He is best known for the monumental faces he has painted in thousands of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints, or looping multi-color brushstrokes using an abstract, highly illusionistic and systematical means of creating portraiture. Viewed at a distance, these large-scale pieces are still highly realistic in nature. Close starts with a photo, covers it with a grid, transfers the grid, enlarged to scale, onto the big blank canvas, and then starts in one corner, applying paint to the squares, repeating the process in pass after pass from different angles. He makes no underlying sketch to guide him– just the grid. The ears and eyes and locks of hair appear only as the regions of hue and dark and light incrementally coalesce into shapes. Form and line, too, are discovered.

Seventh graders used a similar process to create their portraits (but on a much smaller scale!). First, digital photos of the students were manipulated in Photoshop to reduce the portrait to six values/tones and photos were covered with a grid. Students used the photograph to transfer the outlines of their image onto their canvas, using their grids as a map. Once transferred, students focused solely on the values and subtle shapes present within each individual square, not fretting about the details of facial features. For each value, they mixed three paint colors (18 colors in total) ranging from very light to almost black. Then, the piece was painted square by square (in progress pics here) until the forms of their faces began to take shape amid the rainbow of colors! Students added the Chuck Close signature circles and shapes within each grid square to add to the abstract feel and to reinforce the values. Though time consuming, these portraits are fanciful and striking, and art students had a blast creating them!