Crab Drawings in Contour

My drawing and Advance Drawing classes did a mini project in contour lines drawing crab and sea shells. Drawing these shells is challenging but sometimes can feel not so thrilling to students..so this time I decided to add some color and experimentation to the project by having students prepare their papers with a color wash before they started drawing.  Students experimented with all sort of wet wash techniques- drips, splatters, using tape as a resist and each created a different piece onto which to create their crab drawings. Advanced drawing students were given much bigger sheets of paper and asked to push themselves to make the scale of the shells much bigger than life.
 I was happy with how they came out and happy to introduce a little color to the contour drawing unit!

Contour Self -Portraits- Looking and Blind

I'm in a new school! I've been so busy settling in that I haven't updated this in a long time...so now I have lots of projects to share.

I began both my Art 1 and Drawing classes with a unit on contour drawing- I always do because I think it so important and the cornerstone for so much that follows!  Contour drawing is drawing only using lines from observation.  Blind-contour drawing is an exercise where an artist draws the contour of a subject without looking at the paper.

When drawing self-portraits, students fixed their eyes on the outline of their faces, then tracked the edge of the object while simultaneously drawing the contour very slowly, in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil or looking at the paper.

Art Educators have different ideas of why blind-contour drawing is an important method of drawing for art students. Some suggest that the technique improves students' drawings because it causes students to use both senses of sight and touch. Others suggest that pure contour drawing creates a shift from left mode to right mode thinking.  The left mode of the brain rejects meticulous, complex perception of spatial and relational information, which permits the right brain to take over. Blind contour drawing may not produce an easily recognizable drawing, but it helps students to draw more realistically from observation rather than relying on memorized drawing symbols.  Blind contour drawing trains the eye and hand to work as a team, and it helps students to see all of the details of the object.

I always love looking at the portraits of the blind drawings next to the ones that they observed.  Here are some of the faces of Wayland High School- Art 1 and my Drawing and Advanced Drawing classes.

    Self-Portrait's by Clare

Gabi's portrait's - I asked students to have fun with color on their blind drawings. I think they are so interesting!

Yana's self-portraits

I love the color choices Alexa used in her portraits

Erik's Blind- Contour was awesome!

Students in Art 1 did self-portraits with the Blind drawing as a warm up. Here is Noelle's.

Gabriella

Molly

Sam's portraits

The Memory Project

I am the faculty advisor for the Art Club which runs after school once a week. In the past we've used that time to run workshops on things that students have asked to learn that we don't necessarily get to cover in a class, like alternative printmaking processes (potato and gelatin prints!), creating marbled paper, paper bead making, etc. Sometimes kids just want to work on their own thing. It's always been a time for kids who like to hang out and make art to come together and a space to do so. This year the kids wanted to partake in something bigger so we decided to participate in the Memory Project. https://memoryproject.org/. This organization invites participants to paint portraits of children who have been orphaned and neglected throughout the world. Participants create a portrait from photos that are sent to us and then the Memory Project delivers them. We decided on Romania and got our batch of photos in February. We finished them up last week and I am so proud of what our students did!
Here are a few:

Watercolor, by Abbie

This stunning colored pencil portrait is by Allison

Colored pencil portrait by Aimee

Watercolor portrait byCat

Colored Pencil, by Kara

 My colleague and I each did one and then...someone came down with a case of senioritis and wasn't going to complete hers for the deadline, so I ended up with another.

Fellow art teacher Sue, with her beautiful portrait

This was my first one..

 

 

 

and my unexpected second...

Art Club members with their completed portraits- the recipients like to see pictures of who painted/drew them so we included these.

Overall it was a really meaningful and enjoyable project that we were all happy to particpate in. I will definitely steer kids towards this project in the future!!

Texture Collage Project for Basics of Art

I have played around with different projects to explore texture with my introductory art classes over the years. This version of it includes a collage element and allows for students to use their imaginations a bit more than in projects earlier in the semester.

 First I have students brainstorm as many textures as they can. They tend to come up with more if it turns into a competition between the other classes doing the same thing. As you can see on our instagram page, one class won:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDnhsa4BwvF/?taken-by=rmhsartdept
but of course another class had issues with some of their words:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDn2irbhwqm/?taken-by=rmhsartdept  
I was just happy they came up with so many words!

We spend a class period trying to draw as many of these textures as we can with graphite pencils. This is the first time they get to use graphite pencils with varying softness of leads- they practice using line and different values to create some of the textures. We stop and talk about how they went about creating some of the textures they came up with and whether they depended on using symbols or just focused on the surfaces the could imagine.

The next class students search for textures in magazine and then begin thinking about a recognizable shape they could turn them into. For the assignment I ask them to come up with a scenario that includes 12 objects- 6 created from textures found in magazines and 6 drawn by the student recreating the texture in pencil. They need to resolve the background of their piece and incorporate a wide range of values and contrast.

mapping out her composition

looking for textures in magazines in class

this project is pretty entertaining

 and here are some of the results, keep in mind graphite drawings are pretty hard to photograph..these look much better in person.

City Ducks by Alejandro

Textured Tulips by Catie

Textured Turtle by Courtney

Josh created this bakery scene.

Junaid's textured French toast

Haley went with lots of jeans on the clothes line!

Rachel's textured plant pots

This was my example when I first came up with this project and had nothing to show the students!

Kirsten's flowers

Katie's fleet of sail boats.

It ends up being a really fun assignment- I love seeing what my students come up with!

Candy Still-Life Paintings

Last year I had a revelation when I was getting ready to have my Painting students begin their first painting assignment for our still-life unit. I was digging through my still life objects and thinking about how sick I was of painting them- don't get me wrong, there is obviously a ton of benefit from having students work directly from a still life set up in the classroom- and I still set one up every semester for my Introductory classes when they learn how to use charcoal..but..I was tired of having my painting students use the same objects.  I've gotten some pretty amazing still life paintings over the years...

still-life by Jimmy

Still Life by McKenzie

Stuffed Bird Still life by Natalie

..but I needed a change. I wanted to keep it light and have students bring in some more color. The Candy Still-life project was born.

I bring in a some candy and invite my students to do the same if there is something particular they want to paint

Students will then set up a still-life with the candy on their desks

I invite them to think of creative compositions

            

some finished products- by Jillian. I love her color combinations here.

by Jacquelyn

peeps..are always good subjects- by Emma

Have to be honest- this is my favorite! By Kara. I love the narrative she has set up here.

Samantha wanted to challenge herself by including a mason jar

Talia liked the idea of them in motion..I love this too!

 It's been really fun and the still-life seems less of a chore. I always love seeing the unexpected things students will do with these.