Ready for Our Closeups?!

Seventh grade digital photography students recently went outside to take macro photos, focusing on interesting shapes and forms on campus while paying close attention to color, lighting, and composition. After selecting their favorite photo, they used Photoshop to crop it even closer and then rotated, flipped, and duplicated the cropped tile to form an abstracted kaleidoscope image- you can see the steps in this one:

We printed these on photo paper and they are 20" x 20"- I LOVE the results:

Clay Kimono by 5th Grade

You may remember the kimono weavings created by my LS art club earlier this year. Here I am, using the traditional wraparound garments I saw on my trip to Japan last summer as inspiration once again. I can't help it- I am obsessed! In this project, fifth grade girls used the slab method of clay hand building to create their own kimono. After rolling a large, even slab, they traced an oval template, made a hole for the collar and draped the slab over a cone to make it stand. They adorned their kimono with patterns, designs and added pieces. Customarily, young, single Japanese women wear informal kimono with colorful woven patters and dyed repeat patterns, so the fifth graders glazed them accordingly!

Pulling Handles for Mugs

Ceramics Club members are creating mugs as their last project of the year. Yesterday I taught them a method for pulling mug handles that I learned in the Wheel Throwing class I have been taking at Baltimore Clayworks for the past three semesters. This is a common technique used by potters when creating handles for mugs, pitchers, etc...

Students start with a hunk of clay patted into the shape of a carrot. Holding the thick end with one hand, students wet their other hand and use the sides of their thumb and index finger to gently pull the handle downward (like milking a cow!). This motion is repeated many times until the handle has stretched about 4-5":

The handle is then left to 'set up' as pictured below. When it's time to attach it to the mug, students cut the handle on an angle at the thick end and score it to their mug!

A student shows off her mug in progress, before attaching her handle:

Fused/Slumped Glass by 8th Grade

Here are this semester's slumped glass pieces... at last! This time around, I ordered a new brand of glass for the base of the pieces that was more colorful but was considerably thinner. This resulted in a number of them melting at a higher rate and fusing onto the kiln shelves, so five out of fourteen students had to re-make their project. All in all, I had to fire the kiln 8 times to get these pieces fused and slumped. This required a lot of patience on the part of the students (and me!) but they are finally on display and look beautiful! (Learn more about the fusing/slumping process in my previous post on the subject)...

What a Character!

Ceramics Club finished glazing their clay portrait busts last week and they are hot out of the kiln and on display! Check out these characters:

Favorite Sports and Other Hobbies- Observational Drawings

Third trimester 6th graders just completed their observational drawings of sports equipment and other hobby items including ice skates, lacrosse sticks, squash rackets, bathing suit and goggles, a seashell collection and more! After creating an accurate line drawing of their still life object(s), we turned out the lights to create shadows and highlights on the objects and used various drawing pencils in order to create a range of values on the drawings...














Here are the completed artworks:









Look at how far they've come! These are some of their pre-instruction drawings of the equipment- what a difference!: