very small to very big

My Drawing class just finished up a project that challenged them to enlarge the scale of tiny objects and to create interesting compositions. They had their choice from popcorn, elastic bands, screws and dried pasta pieces.  They picked their objects and then we glued them on small paper plates so they would not move and that their cast shadows would be more visible. I had my Drawing students use graphite pencils to try and capture a full range of value and my Advanced Drawing students use white conte crayon on black paper.  I was so happy with the results!

Dried Pasta Still-Life by Clare

Pasta Still Life by Anna

Amanda's still life composed of rubber bands, dried pasta and screws

by Hallie

Love the mark-making on this one by John

Madi did a nice job with the reflections on these screws

Beautiful Pasta still life by Marlee

Martin's piece 

Pasta still life by Mary

Awesome Popcorn piece by Isabelle

Art 1- Self-portrait in objects

To wrap up our unit on contour drawing, I've had my students in Art 1 create a self-portrait by choosing 6 objects that they feel represent them. It's always an interesting way to learn more about my students as it is still pretty early in the year. They could play around with scale, were asked to draw from life with one exception where they could use a reference photo if the object was too big to bring in and create interesting composition. Everyone had to draw at least one object in cross-contour lines to really show its form. It's fun to see what objects everyone draws in common (mostly their phones!).  Here are some examples from this year:

Rylan incorporated a map of one of her favorite places

Beautiful drawing by Yana

nice composition by Alexa

Isabel's drawing

by Isabella

by Jenna

Julia is a rower, which is why she has so many band aids for her hands!

Nice drawing by Karlis

Makayla's piece

Sophia did a great job drawing her soccer goalie gloves

Timmy had fun playing with scale on this one

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!!