Visual Pun Sketchbook Assignment

I am often struggling to come up with new and exciting sketchbook assignments for my students. I use sketchbooks in all my classes, all levels.  For the introductory classes I have them pass them in weekly and for my AP class they are due biweekly as I expect them to be more resolved. The idea of illustrating a visual pun- either an expression, a compound word or an idiom has been popular with all of my classes.
 I have seen my fair share of "Apple of my Eye" over the years, so much so that I am not going to show you an example because I am pretty tired of it, here are some fun ones from over the years:

"In a Pickle" by Basics of Art Student Jordan

"Under the Weather" by Studio Art (Pre. A.P.) student Aimee

"Hot Potato" by A.P. Student Juliann

"Fire Drill" by A.P. Student Tyler

A few years ago a student in my A.P. Studio Art class had some much fun with this assignment she decided to build her concentration on idioms. This resulted in some really fun pieces that she was really engaged in for an entire semester.  The rest of the class also enjoyed brainstorming possible ideas for her during class critiques.  Here are a few pieces from Abbie's concentration.

"Butterflies in your Stomach"

"Heart Beating out of your Chest"

"Frog in Your Throat"

Lastly, sometimes I do the sketchbook assignments along with my students. They are fairly entertained by it and I enjoy working along side them. I present to you "Runny Nose".

What about you? Do you have any sketchbook assignments/prompts that students love to do?

 I'd love to hear about them.

Pen and Ink Project for Basics of Art: My Favorite Food

In my intro class I spend the first few weeks of the semester going over contour drawing. We draw hands, ourselves, objects in the room, each other with weighted line, cross-contour and blind. It's fun and important but we're all ready to start incorporating value by the end. My second unit introduces value with a variety of mark making techniques. We switch it up and use pen and ink. For some reason students are always thrilled for the first few days of using "old fashioned" pens.
 After they've tried out cross-hatching, stippling, using words and other marks they are ready to try to create a unified image incorporating different mark making techniques and a wide range of values. I've changed it up over the years but a favorite is always drawing one's favorite food.
Some examples from this year:

I love seeing the wide range of stuff they come up with, though I do get a lot of images of pizza and burgers!  To help them take of pick reference photos for this assignments I show them these images in the beginning to talk about composition.

Of course I encourage them to take their own pictures for reference, but if they don't happen to be eating their favorite food over the course of the project that could be tough so I let them use the internet for reference photos as long as they change things up a bit and don't copy the image they found outright.

This project usually takes about 2 weeks of class time (we meet for 6 days out of a 7 day cycle) for 55 minutes.

new incarnation of this blog: adventures in the high school class room

I've been posting my own work over at www.veroniquelatimer.tumblr.com and on instagram @ vlatimerstudio. This summer I challenged myself to try and paint at least thirty minutes a day- for the most part I did and as the new school year approached I was feeling like I really couldn't give up trying to sneak in some painting on a daily basis. I'm happy to report I am still doing it for the most part so you can head on over there for some of my hits and misses in my studio. I decided to keep this blog as a resource for an opportunity to showcase some of the things I am doing in my high school classroom where I teach 9-12 graders in  a suburban Boston public school in a variety of classes from introductory art to AP Studio/Portfolio Prep.
  I'm not exactly sure where it'll go but welcome!

I've been teaching at the same school  since 2006. Here I am doing my teacher thing.