Master Copies

Students attempt to copy the masters. Sometimes the best way to learn is to copy, until you can do it for yourself. Can you figure out what artist they are replicating?

Ashton O.

Bekah T.

Josie M. 

Finn S. 

Kaycee J.

Nina K.

Jenna C.

Terrance S. 

Printmaking

Printmaking. The last art class I took in college, but one of my absolute favorites.

In my very first year of teaching, I taught the intro students how to do collagraph printmaking out of found materials. They turned out... interesting. It looks like modern or contemporary art I suppose.

The second year we explored block printing with linoleum stamps. This was a huge improvement. Here are a few products with the students' own designs. This was such a silly class. They turned out pretty nice, and some of the extra prints even appeared all around the school for months after the project was complete.

 Alex                      Josie                     Ashton

This third time around, I wanted the project to be more about the process and technique and not so much about taking time to create their own design. They explored watercolor techniques for the backgrounds and looked up pop culture images to copy from for the carved print. The project went even smoother this time.

They look great on the corner wall leading out the school doors!

Scratchboard Art

When I was in high school we had an assignment to create art from scratchboard. I've only ever done it the one time. I thought it would be fun to introduce it to the intro class this year while learning about line and texture quality.

This is my own project from high school. It was based off an image of my pug/chihuahua dog. I'll be honest, I have no idea how I accomplished this back then. It's amazing to me. 

I think I ordered some poor quality scratchboard for my class this year because it was actually quite difficult for the students to scratch and work with. We couldn't use the wooden sticks provided so we used paper clips. It worked for the most part. 

Here are some fun works of art produced from the ERATS intro class. I love when their little practice piece matches their larger one. 

Alyssa's beautifully textured rose. 

Alayna's majestic eagle.

John's very textured face icon.

Wyatt's whimsical dinosaur.

Gesture People Sculptures

On this project the intro class learned about gesture drawing and human proportions. We made wire with paper mache sculpture people. I'm always surprised at how different each student makes their art and the ideas they have, which can sometimes be very strange. I got this original lesson idea from student teaching 6th grade art last year. Ninth grade enjoyed this too. They really like getting their hands messy.

All the bodies...

Smurfette 

Zombie!

Did we just become best friends?

The elusive white ninja

Uh... lol, some students' ideas

gotta catch 'em all!

Thank you, thank you very much.

purple chicken pox?

Shiny, puff ball person

Dance Par-tay! Can arms bend like that?

What every girl wants, their very own boyfriend doll.

Facebook Like Man

Selfie Half-zies Portraits

Here I wanted the students to learn both pencil shading and color pencil mixing for skin tones while understanding face proportions. It all started with a selfie (or regular picture if they didn't want to selfie). They folded the image in half and symmetrically drew each side of their face, one in pencil and the other in color pencil. I'd say they turned out pretty fun looking.

Intro Art Beginnings

Unit 1 in the intro class begins with non-objective art and exploring mediums and techniques based on the elements of art. Here we have some charcoal form still lives, collagraph textured prints, and color wheel mandalas. Just a few of many. They are all doing so awesome.