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!

Clay Aquarium Castles

It's funny, though not surprising, that the Lower School Art Clubbers care way more about their 28 cent goldfish than they do about the beautiful and whimsical clay castles they made for their fish to hide in! Here are a few photos of the clay castles on display... fish and all!

Three-step Reduction Prints

Asante Cloth- or Kente, is a ceremonial cloth hand-woven on a loom in Ghana, Africa. Rich, colorful repeating patterns are woven into 4-inch strips and are sewn together into larger pieces of cloth. Cloths come in various colors, sizes and designs and are worn during very important social and religious occasions, but kente is more than just cloth. It is a visual representation of history, philosophy, ethics, oral literature, moral values, social code of conduct, religious beliefs, political thought and aesthetic principles.

In this project, LS Art Club members created their own patterned kente by using a 3-step reduction printing process. A pattern was first scratched into a rectangular piece of printing foam and this design was printed six times on colored paper with ink of their choice. Next, the plate was 'reduced' by cutting out areas to create new patterns. This reduced printing plate was printed on top of the first six prints. Plates were reduced one last time and were printed once more with a third color!

This Week in the Art Room...

We're rounding out the 3rd quarter this week and lots of projects are underway or wrapping up. Here's a recap of what's been going on in the art room this week...

5th graders are busy creating all of the colors on the color wheel by mixing only the primary colors, black and white. They are creating a color wheel accordion book including tints and shades of each color:
6th grade art students are drawing from observation. This quarter, students are drawing their hands spelling out their names in American Sign Language. We're using lamps as spotlights in order to create shadows and highlights:6th grade art historians are working in small groups on Windows Moviemaker movies about the Renaissance as their final project. They will present on their topics (architecture, sculpture or painting) tomorrow in class:7th graders are creating coil pots out of red low-fire clay inspired by the pottery of ancient Greece. They are going to be impressive!:8th graders have been painting the self portrait masks they casted from their faces the week before spring break. I don't have any in progress photos, but here are some from the plastering process:LS Art Club members completed their most recent project this past Tuesday (photos of the final products to come). They created a three-step reduction print inspired by African kente cloth. Here are some pics from Tuesday:Ceramics Club is on hiatus this week- the third session starts next Monday and there is still room if you want to participate. Sign up in the office with Mrs. Conkling!

Frosty Tree Paintings

In their first project this semester, LS Art Club members painted winter scenes with acrylic paint on canvas panels using the concepts of foreground, middleground and background, overlapping, tints and shades. Their paintings were inspired by the famous poem by Robert Frost...
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.