Costumed Person

This costumed person project was completed by my advanced art students.  I gave them the option of colored pencils, chalk pastels, or charcoal pencils.  They could draw almost anyone, the person just had to have some sort of "costume".  I love when my students produce such a variety of different artworks with the same theme.   

This one is an old Halloween costume.  

Torn Magazine Projects

I just realized that I haven't posted a single project from this school year.  I have an entirely different group of high school students this year compared to my first year.  They are harder working, many are self-motivated and it's been showing in their projects.  Here are a few examples of my Advanced Art students Torn Magazine Projects.  These were tedious and took some time (and a little complaining), but it was worth it.  I was very please with the out comes!

High School Art Final Exam

I struggled all year with creating tests and exams for my high school art students. The second half of this year our students all received iPads. I wanted to incorporate technology into and it came to me....make an electronic portfolio.  Students made a keynote slide show which included a title page, a slide for each artwork made this year, on each artwork slide students needed to have the media and  elements and principles of design used. On the last slide the students could write what they liked, disliked, and learned the art this year.  I was so happy with many of the final products. It was nice to see my students take ownership of what they've created! I will definitely be doing this again next year.

High School Art Final Exam Example 1

High School Art Exam Example 2

Summer break is almost here!

I love projects like this just before summer break.  I think many of us have our minds on somewhere warmer with water, waves, and sand!  

After Hours

I planned to have the k-12 art show in the elementary school.  One night I went up to the elementary to get things ready for the art show and hung one framed high school project for each student using 3M velcro strips.  

Well, I teach in two separate buildings.  The k-6 students  are clueless on what the 7-12 students are creating in art and vise versa.  This did not dawn on me until the next morning when I heard all of the ohhs and ahhs from the elementary kids.  Their comments about the high school artwork were so kind, I wish the older kids could have heard the excitement in the k-6 voices.    

Chuck Close Inspired Art

This assignment was a little more involved than what my students have been used to this year.  

For this one they drew a picture of something/someone with pencil and the shaded it to look realistic.  Then lightly colored each square with colored pencils to look like a Chuck Close artwork.  

 For this one pencils where not used for shading.  This student just colored the entire project with colored pencils.

Flexibility is a huge word in my classroom.  It started out to be a Chuck Close gridded project, but ended up to look like this.  This student drew a picture of her and her twin sister.  When she brought it back to school with wrinkles throughout the tagboard from rolling it up too tight.  We decided to make the wrinkles look like they were meant to be there.  So we burnt the edges of the paper, and a few spots in the middle.  Then she painted it with tea to make it look antiqued.  I was very happy with how it turned out!  

More high school artwork

The last nine week just flew by, students worked on so many different projects.  Here are just a few below.  You can check out more on our Artsonia site: 

http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=27217

 Zentangle Animals

 Giant Japanese Drawing

Symmetrical Bugs

Abnormal Colored Portraits

Here is another Advanced Art project students were able to choose from this nine weeks.  They chose a portrait of a person, drew it, and colored it with oil pastels.  I required the students to use unusual colors.  It was difficult for many of them to think out side of the "normal" box.  

Here are a few of the results...

High School Handscapes

Four this nine weeks my Advanced Art students are given a four different projects to choose from.  They are left open ended enough so each student can have a finished artwork that represents themselves.  The students need to have three projects completed by the end of the nine weeks.  One of the projects on this nine weeks was themed "Handscapes".  They could basically take that theme and come up with their idea of a "Handscape".  They used a variety of media; colored pencils, watercolor pencils, watercolor paints, tempera paints, pencil, markers, oil pastels, etc.  

Here are a few results...

This student was inspired by Dali.  

This student wants to go to college for art.  He was struggling to come up with an idea for this project, writer's block if you will.  He ended up with this and I loved the meaning of it.  This eyeball represents his mind, the fist is cracking open the "mind" to let out all of the ideas that he sometimes has trouble just getting out.  

Adding grades 7-12...my first 9 weeks.

Before starting at Continental I hadn't worked with high school students for 8 years.  I recently finished my first nine weeks as a K-12 art teacher.  It was a huge adjustment adding grades 7-12 to my daily schedule.  Here's some of what my students produced our first nine weeks:

This project was call "Two-Toned Drawing".  Student could choose almost whatever they wanted as their subject, they drew it on two different colored pieces of charcoal paper.  We worked on proportion, value and blending techniques.

This is an example of Art 1's first project.  This project was very basic and it helped me figure out the level each student was at.  It also helped me learn what type of craftsmanship students would put into their project.

Here are a few examples of Art 1's Value Grid, Self-Portrait Drawings.  I think that many student's surprised themselves at how much their drawings looked like them.