Archive for the ‘art education’ Category

In the midst of everything yesterday, I forgot that I had started new art classes. Yesterday’s group, especially, really resisted the first sketching. “I can’t draw” was the constant refrain. I didn’t push the first sketch, but when we came to the doodle, there was a little more freedom that I could sense. As I walked around, I made positive comments about everything I saw, and more and more kids started filling up their papers with doodles. Funny – they can doodle in class, but not when it’s an assignment. The eighth graders in particular were very difficult. Tomorrow when I see them they will use some math skills and create a small frame to isolate one part of their doodle, add color, and frame it for their first piece of art.

I introduced them to Photoshop as we started looking at line as an element. We were short of time yesterday, but today with the seventh graders I was able to show them a few web pictures – sent to me and I don’t know where – of some interesting advertising. I want the kids early on to think that art is much more than drawing. What follows is just two of them….

We still aren’t in the art room – the large tables are set up, but regular chairs – so trying to draw or paint would put a horrible strain on the back. Figures – and it’s a good thing I checked before class started. I will still need to bring computer cords back and forth if I want to use internet – which I do. Too many good things to see on line!

It has been a very nice two weeks of vacation. I finished up my lesson plans last night, knowing full well if I didn’t I would hate myself today. So by 9 PM last night I had everything packed to go for Monday morning. A tradition for the last couple of years has been to have dinner with Ali so I don’t stew about going back to school. We didn’t do it this August because I thought I was okay, but I really missed our getting together for dinner.

I met with Yvonna today for breakfast. It is worse other places. We started teaming together almost 7 years ago in the sixth grade. We hit it off right away – two intellectual, smart women with the same approach to kids and teaching. We don’t see each other as often, so we always have lots to catch up on. Both of us are having a hard time coping with the changes in education and what we are being forced to do as a result of district demands. One thing I said to her, and again to Sam who is so depressed about going back, is that we have to remember at this time in education we have a mission to try and do what is right by our students, regardless of the roadblocks. This is a battle I am choosing to fight. Right now the most creative thing I can do is attempt to reach my kids despite teaching to a flawed test.

I took care of a lot of loose ends today, left over from my list-making on Thursday. I did very well. I have a huge list of loose ends for tomorrow and the rest of the week, but these are mostly so I don’t have to remember them and worry about forgetting and not having what I need for class. I ordered the 100 free postcards from VistaPrint – took me an hour to work through all the sizing and the problems with downloading. But – should be on the way in a couple of weeks. I chose the Cosmos piece, since it shows both the marbling and the digital manipulation.

I had a bit of an epiphany concerning my art classes, and I am going to dwell on this to get me through the remaining 92 days till summer. Maybe Fate decided it would be good for me to have art classes, as now I have a chance to feed children’s souls, beyond the testing situations. I have a chance to show them art, to explore ideas, to give them a taste of what they can do by following their artistic side.

A very busy morning – did lots of shredding of old IRS stuff, old business stuff – several bags for recycling. Did some cleaning (still have a very long way to go….) And I got a walk in – the weather is nice and breezy. We burned sage in several of the spots around the house – get the good energy flowing.

As I reflect back on 2007, it was a good art year. Not so much in terms of actual fiber created, but we were able to finally solve our marbling problems, I started on Photoshop, and I finally got into doing digital work from the marbled fabrics. We sold an art piece (Night Eyes, from some of our first framed attempts), had some good ebay custom orders, and felt like we had momentum with Marble T. Now it’s time to look at the coming year and what we would like to accomplish. Which I think will be our goals for this week – we definitely want to reactivate our Preferred list, so we get more hits on the website, as well as add more fiber work. I want to get a fiber portfolio completed, and I would like to enter a minimum of five different shows this year.

Lots to think about, and trying to balance the momentum with school with be interesting – as usual. I completed most of my art plans today – looked through standards, sketched out the semester projects, and developed the rules for art class – which I think are pretty good. One of the things that amazed me as I was working with the art standards is how much my kids were actually in the intermediate set of standards, between the various discussions and projects. I feel really good about that.

Math – that’s another thing to think about over the next few days. I’m avoiding it because teaching to the test really is morally and ethically against everything I believe that makes a good education for a child. Heard from Kathy in Vermont that the new principal is even thinking about doing away with their exploratory classes in favor of more academics. Who was it who said a society is judged by its art? The Bush years have not been good ones for civilization…..

I’m working on another piece off a freeform pattern – here it is in original, black and white lines, and then as the genesis of a Rainforest piece.

Two days of some hard physical labor and the art show is up! All the activity really makes me wonder how I used to do all the musicals – ‘course that was 16 years ago. Sheesh, I’m getting old. Yesterday my eighth graders helped with all the nuts and bolts (literally) of putting the panels together. Today with my seventh grade I did a quick design lesson about measuring, making sure things are straight, looking for balance, a good color mix – and then they took the artwork, chose a panel, and started to mount the work.

Two of my girls helped me during seventh period (thanks Arreana and Zayra!) and they rearranged a few panels so the work was more balanced. Turns out they discovered they have a very good eye for this sort of thing! So here they are – five out of the 10 panels – notice what I mean about the great stone wall?

You can see some of the digital work the kids did, plus some of the stained glass letters.

The circle piece is really fun – Brianna did a bunch of overlapping circles and didn’t know where to go from there. I suggested she vary the colors from light to dark and she ended up with incredible depth to the piece.


Some of the geometrics, once color was added, really improved their impact. The bottom piece started out as a perspective lesson, and when Jullian framed it off-center, it led to him adding the flames around the NYC skyline in memory of September 11.

After a lot of angst in trying to figure out how to get the art show hung, I called the Educational Materials Center for the district – problems solved! They will be shipping ten 4 x 6 feet panels to the school next week, so we will be able to hang all the work in the front and have it look great. I need to get the invitations set for the kids to color and deliver to those they would like to attend the show.

Also, I had good luck in starting to print out the digital doodles, as well as the t-shirt transfers. It’s going to be very cool to see the kids walking around wearing their art. This will probably become extremely popular, so if they didn’t sign up by the deadline, if they want to pay a dollar, I can buy new transfers – I already bought the first set, and Sam has donated some.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with how things are going. Most of the kids got additional grammar lessons from me as they were writing their artist statements. One of my students, very quiet and unassuming, got into using a variety of blues in his digital doodle, along with the liquify brush and other filters to create some interesting footprints hidden among other shapes. It will be very cool. And – I will be taking photos next week to post.

I showed the kids the deal I got from Michael’s crafts – five bucks for a 130-piece set of art supplies, pastels, crayons, markers. A great deal, and we looked up all the addresses for the local Michael’s. One of the kids gave me a smaller set of supplies at the start of the year, and the kids love using the oil pastels. Also, several of the kids really got into the markers and were drawing chocolate covered cherries. Looked pretty yummy!

It’s a rainy day in Tucson, which happens rarely, so a good day to go out and about for shopping. Our destination was Michael’s, so I could get tissue paper for wreaths, iron-on transfers for the kids’ t-shirts, and a gift card for my niece – and ended up with a $5 paint/pastels set, charcoal paint for marbling, transfers……no gift card. At least I remembered it before we drove out of the parking lot. The mind – going rapidly……

I want to let the kids know about the paint sets on sale – some of them could afford the tools. And – I probably should pick up one or two for “Best of Show” in the art show – as I don’t think we are going to get framing…..

Had a sugar drop – unusual for me – at least I think it was a sugar drop – felt better after lunch – now I understand what Dean goes through.

I’m hoping to look at more of the tutorials on NAPP – also, I am showing Dean some of the cool stuff on Photoshop. Here’s a piece he played with:

I love it because it looks like it have been stitched with thread.

I had all sorts of ideas during the school day of things I wanted to post on the blog. Most of them have since gone away, but I do have some thoughts on art for next semester. When I start with line as the first visual art element, I will have Photoshop on so the kids can do examples and begin experimenting with the program. I should get some amazing digital work from the kids next semester – assuming that the school gets the Promethean board hooked up in the art room. Given the emphasis on technology in schools, it surprises me that we can’t get Photoshop put on other computers. I know there has to be a district site license for the program.

I’m also hoping to have the old scanner in the art room, so we can scan work right away. And I will look at using Photoshop to teach color as an element – we can use a lot for value, tints, and hues, so the kids can understand that better.

I will break out the paints next semester, as I want to expose the kids to that medium, assuming I am in the art room and not my classroom. We should start mounting and collecting pieces for the second semester art show. Now I have to get materials ready and visit the frame place for mat board.

I took the camera to school yesterday to get pictures of the art work, especially the doodles, the kids have been doing. Forgot that Rich was coming to tape, and so got involved with that. Had a great taping session, but will have to bring the camera next week.

I am slowly starting to feel better – for the last three nghts I have actually been doing some Photoshop stuff. Since I have been emphasizing line in art class, I have been thinking more about it myself. I am fascinated by what Photoshop can do with turning work into line art. So I chose a couple more pieces of marbled fabric to see what I could do with them. This could be a whole new way of moving with the fabric.

Here’s the original piece from last night:

This is really a pretty piece of fabric, but it just seems too muted. Even with curves and adjustments, I can’t seem to make this a “wow” piece.

This is after sharpening and then doing the invert to get the line drawing:

It wasn’t looking like much to me. Usually with the line drawings, once I do the inversion, then I can see a picture in it. I was puzzling on an image when Dean said it looked like a ski slope from the air. So then I started adding woods:

I need to do some more work here – still not satisfied. I was playing around with a number of the brushes and different colors – maybe to be more accurate I can increase the size and change the pixels to get more depth and accuracy. At this point I was wondering about getting to the snow – how could I add that against an already white background? I played with light shades of grays with blue tints, and then with the snowflake brush. Here’s what I got:

Not bad, but still needs work. I would like to darken the greens and add some more browns, so I can do a specific brush effect on the top and make it look like we are seeing through swirling snow.

I was trying to come up with another idea for art class – we have done a lot with pencil and very basic elements of visual art. I just am not going to set up paints in my classroom. So I thought about doodling – which kids do so much on their papers when they are bored. I thought that maybe they wouldn’t let themselves get hung up on creating something that looked like an actual object.

They did the doodles yesterday – and today they had to follow directions on creating a small construction paper frame (including math…). They were to use the frame to isolate a part of their doodle that they really liked and then color just that part. They would mount the frame over that piece, leaving the rest of the doodle so viewers could see the whole inspiration.

We don’t have any display bulletin boards, so I decided to mount the doodles on the empty lockers outside the classrooms, and some of the kids cut out letters for “Doodle Art” in school colors. The display looks quite nice. I think the kids were quite surprised at how a simple doodle could turn into a piece of art. Some of my “harder” eighth grade boys spent a lot of time looking at the designs, pleased to show off their own. I’ll try to get pictures.

We are moving from the doodles to “digital doodles,” letting the kids fool around with Photoshop and try some of the brushes and shapes. They are much freer to try things in Photoshop since they can just delete layers.

I have had a few ah-ha’s since starting to teach these art classes. As I am trying to put together lessons that look at the visual elements of art, I am struck by the importance of line in teaching kids. We have done several activities, the last looking at using scale factor to make a small drawing larger. The kids were amazed that they were able to create a larger copy of a drawing and have it look just like the original. Plus, it coincided with their math class on similarity and scale factor. Grid the original, make the next grid a scale factor larger (in this case the scale factor was 3 so we could keep it on a large sheet of paper), and then copy square by square, focusing just on the lines in that square.

Interesting the number of students who couldn’t work with the individual squares and focus in just on the lines. So many of these kids are so deprived in any kind of art education. Makes me think of growing up – never went to museums unless it was a class trip – hear hear for field trips! I can understand even more their importance, when I realize that for many kids they will only see art through school. And this is the class that seems to get cut the most often. I can see that at my school this year, compared to the art magnet school I worked at. There is no visual art program at tis school, beyond what I am doing, and it really is a shame not to have the expopsure.

We spent yesterday setting up to marble (which always takes so long, with pretreating and actually setting up the liquid bath), but then today we got to play – marbled about 6 yards of fabrics, and once again everything went really well. It is so nice to be back in the large tray again – we actually feel like we are creating art again, not just little pieces to sell. Yet again today we were talking about how much of a void there was in our artistic lives when we couldn’t create large pieces of fabric. When you define your art this way for over 14 years, it really is distressing to lose the skills.

Especially nice is the fact that we are working with other fabrics. Tried some larger heavy-weight silk that worked wonderfully, as well as some faux suede pieces, and the velveteen also worked. I still need to treat the velveteen to soften it up, but overall extremely pleased. Still haven’t been able to do the chiffon again – those people who bought that two years ago certainly have one-of-a-kind pieces!

We want to marble more often now that things are working again. It is SO GOOD to be creating fabric again! We even are revisiting marketing and revving up the business end because we are turning out really great fabric. The disadvantage is that our bodies have changed enough that we can no longer go for six hours straight, not including clean-up. There was a time four years ago when we could do 60 fat quarters in a day. Can’t do that any more, and we also discovered we don’t like turning out fabric that way – we would just as soon do a smaller amount and have a chance to play on each of the pieces.

We are still looking for a particular fabric that we used for so many of our art pieces – we used a poly-satin that kind of worked, but not to the detail we would like. I found an old piece that we’ll use in checking around fabric stores. All the really great pieces are from bridal fabrics, so we just have to shop around for those.

This piece that I’ve scanned shows the incredible detail you can get on the poly fabrics.

Then I started playing with some of the new tools from the Photoshop lessons. This next is with the Shadows and Highlights adjustment. I particularly like the neon effect on the orange.

This next is playing around with the eye dropper tool and the white space. Each gives a different feel, which is why I have wanted to learn Photoshop for so long. I want to be able to take a really great piece of fabric and use it to create lots of other images, so the particular piece doesn’t have a short shelf life till someone buys it.

And finally – the joy of playing with filters in Photoshop! Take a look at what happens with the emboss filter with the same piece! Reminds me of maps of the Continental Shelf.

All in all, a great way to spend a day off from school (Rodeo days here in the Old Pueblo)!

So I played some more today to try to come up with something that does more with linking and gradients. I must confess gradients are still a puzzlement – I keep getting weird colors. I am pleased, however, with the sky gradient in this piece. And I am having trouble with getting the grass brushes to be the greens I want instead of a series of mottled colors.

With this piece – Ocotillo – an abstract look at the almost dead-looking cactus that doesn’t bloom until rainy season – seems to be a cross with autumn. Oh well, it’s my vision! I linked the veins with the flowers – mostly. I had each flower (mostly) on a separate layer – except for the one falling, which got connected with one of the others. I do have a better sense of how this stuff works. I am enjoying just creating little pieces to work with the tools.

Reminder to me: LABEL LAYERS!!! Here goes –

I had fun last night playing again with the brushes and trying to create different layers and link them – still need to work on that – need to reread the linking stuff. I’m getting better at adding the layers each time I try something new.

I am drawn to geometric shapes – I think in the analysis it’s because they “always look like something,” so I can’t really mess them up. I do need to scan and play with one of my own sketches, to see what I can do with the brushes. But – here’s the new work:

I’m continuing to play around with more brushes as part of this week three lesson. For this portion we were to work on layers, and then move one of our objects. So here we go –

I would like to figure out how to make the shadows of the sun better, as well as crop the sun for the second one. But for a freehand, not too bad. I had watched Sewing With Nancy about landscape quilts, and part of what was included in that episode was tips on shading. So I wanted to do more with the window frame – but it needs to be larger – the scale seems all right for this, but not for more shading.

This just means I have to do more work…ahhh, too bad!

This is week 3 of my Photoshop class from myJanee.com. We are working with brushes, which is something I discovered a few months ago, when I needed to make a feather. We are to paint, using the brushes, and my background started me freaking about the “painting” having to “look like something.” Hmmmm….remnants of early grades art classes! So I decided I was just going to start learning about the various brushes – trying each set of brushes on a different layer with different colors, till I found something I liked.

Finally, after about 20 brushes, I discovered a small one that had some jaggedness to it – I was on blue as a color at this point, and as I was scribbling, I liked the horizontal effect of the brush, as opposed to the curve or vertical stroke. As I was working with this brush, I got the sense of the edge of water, and so I decided to continue with that.

I also am fascinated with the little grass brushes, so I started experimenting with them and started getting some nice depth. Then I wanted some sky, and I went with the star brush, the “dissolve” setting, a medium opacity, and a very pale yellow. Started looking like a sky, and I used the same brush with a blue to increase the sky. I was very happy with that effect.

The water – not as happy, but I still need to experiment. I am overall pleased with the piece, for just scribbling. We’ll see what happens with it in the rest of the lesson.