All Eyes On You

The Advanced Art class just finished a project on realistic eye drawings. They drew their eyes from direct observation in a mirror or from a photograph onto wooden blocks (1x4"pine). Some chose to use ebony pencil and charcoal, while a few tried out watercolor pencils for the first time. They all turned out great, and combined with my next 12 weeks Advanced Art class, will make a very interesting installation piece for the middle school!You can see all the results on our school page on Artsonia.

We're Getting Messy!

The paint has been out all week, and the students are loving it! In art class, we have been learning all about color theory and all the vocabulary that goes along with it. We are painting creative color wheels with tempera paint, and mixing all the colors on the wheel from the primary colors only.

The color wheels are a radial design the students created by making a wedge shaped motif and flipping it around the circle, kind of like a snowflake. 

We started by mixing the warm colors, and yesterday the cools. Complementary colors are added to each wedge for contrast. If you look closely at the finished pieces, you will be able to see 3 colorwheels all on the same design! All painting should be finished and projects cut out by the middle of next week. Check out all the different designs then on Artsonia!

Eyes on You

The Advanced Art Students are learning how to draw their eyes from direct observation, which is a pretty difficult challenge. They have tackled it with amazing results! They really took the time to make them look realistic through shading. We are now going to practice some eyes in colored pencil as well as watercolor pencil. The drawings are going to be transferred onto a piece of wood for an installation project here at the school.

Graffiti Madness!

The art students have been hard at work coloring their graffiti tags. Everyone loves this project. Each tag is different, reflecting the unique personality of the artist.The students learned some new vocabulary concepts on this project including gradation, overlapping, analogous colors and complementary colors. Look for all of them to be up on Artsonia in the next couple of days.

Hard Work Pays Off!

The Advanced Art students must have been very busy working on their shoe projects this past weekend. All their hard work really paid off! The results shown in class today were amazing! The pieces are almost complete with some minor revisions being made for tomorrow. The students were able to choose what type of composition they were going to use, and also which medium they wanted to use. You can see in the photos all the different individual approaches to the project. All the shoes were drawn from direct observation which is very challenging to most students this age.

We held an in-class critique today called a TAG critique. In this type of critique students are asked to select someone else's work and TAG it. They have to do the following:

 T: Tell the artist something they like about the piece

 A: Ask the artist a question about the piece

G: Give the artist a suggestion about something to add or revise in the piece

Through this process, the students were able to reflect on their work and come up with some ways of completing or changing their work. Everyone participates in this casual, no stress critique. It's a great way to learn how to talk more about our own art and the work of others.

I can't wait to see the final results in class tomorrow. The students will be photographing their work and uploading it to the Artsonia site. It will be very interesting to see all the unique results and read their individual artist statements. I am so proud of their effort on this first project! Way to go! We have some very talented students here at JMMS!

What's Your Tag?

Well, it was a long, short week, but we finally have some progress to show on our graffiti tags! Parents, I'm sure you have already heard about this project- it's a pretty popular one. Don't worry, there is no spray paint involved in these tags!

In class, we looked at several examples of graffiti and street art and had a lively discussion about whether it should be legal, or whether it really is vandalism. There were many points of view on both sides. We then broke graffiti tags down into the elements of art used to create them and began drawing our own tags. The students could use their name or a nickname (lots of gamer tags came up) and drew their tag in graffiti style letters. Adding a drop shadow to make their name look 3-D was challenging for many students, but everyone was able to get it eventually. Here are a few tags from class on Friday. This week we will learn how to color them, using gradation techniques with oil pastel. More photos to come later this week.