Lessons
April Showers Bring May Flowers
“Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.” – Stevie Wonder For the last few classes, students have been working on drawing flowers. The focus of this project is on drawing from observation, abstraction of composition, […]
Digital Art: SketchNoting
“All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.” – Leonardo da Vinci When I searched for an appropriate quote for this post about SketchNoting, I was thinking of note taking as idea gathering and remembering, working through thoughts in a visible way. Of course my mind jumped to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which are […]
ZoneDoodles
“Doodling serves as a means of keeping the hand or fingers limber, so that they are always ready for serious work.” – Charles E. Burchfield Doesn’t everyone doodle? When I was a kid, I’d fill our phone book with doodles as I stretched the phone cord as far as I could to attain privacy away from […]
Light-Up Artwork with Paper Circuits
“Art history is littered with work that involves light.” – James Turrell, Artist Following the lead of artist, James Turrell, in the early days of April, we worked on drawings with oil pastel to which we added LED lights, by creating Paper Circuits. We used multi-colored LED lights, copper tape, a battery and a piece […]
Making Mandalas
Compasses, protractors, and rulers…oh my! Mandalas: Where art and math collide. As shared in the last post about Sketchbooks, this term we created Mandalas on the covers of our newly made sketchbooks. We used protractors, compasses, rulers, pencils, and markers. Here is a short video showing how to make them: Once the Mandalas were underway […]
New Art On Artsonia
Long after our in-house art show is over, our online gallery continues to display new artwork. Today, three new projects have been uploaded to Artsonia. Abstraction: For this project, students divided the 2 dimensional paper plane of a still life using an abstraction technique called Contour Continuation. Once divided, they filled the positive space with […]
Curating, Plagiarism & Appropriation
A fellow student in a grad class introduced me to this article by Debra Zarka Miller about a lesson she uses with her higher education students to hit home good citation habits. I thought it was very clever and decided to modify it to fit my fifth and sixth grade middle school art students. Here is […]
