Ceramics elective

8th grade students in ceramic class have been practicing their hand-building techniques with clay. They have made slabs with textures and created houses and boxes with lids out of slabs. They are now working on pinch pots, creating pots and bowls with an interesting lip and foot. Some of the vocabulary words they have been working with are:

Kiln: the oven that fires the kiln, can get up to 3000 degrees F.

Greenware: clay that is new and wet

Leather-hard: clay that is somewhat dry, but can still be manipulated slightly

Dry clay: clay that has been left out to air dry

Bisque: clay that has gone through the kiln once, and has been forever changed from clay to stone

Glazed: clay that has a surface decoration of glaze that gives it a glass finish. Clay has been through the kiln two times.

Slip and Score: using lines and wet slip to connect two pieces of clay

Thick as your Thumb: the maximum thickness you can make your clay without it blowing up in the kiln.

Wedge: to get the air bubbles out of clay by pushing or throwing the clay onto a hard surface

to learn more about clay techniques, go to: http://pottery.about.com/od/handbuildingtechniques/tp/basicover.htm

Learning to Draw Self-Portraits

7th grade art studio class learned some great artist's tricks of how to draw self-portraits. They first drew their face using observational skills and looking in a mirror. They then studied the parts of a face, concentrating on proportions, eyes, noses, mouths and hair. Students redrew their faces. They found it easier to observe, measure and compare shapes and sizes of parts of the face when looking at a photograph of themselves. Comparing the two drawings side by side, you can see amazing differences in what these students have observed. 
Much of art is learning how to look carefully. When we can shut off the symbolic part of our brain that says an eye looks like this...and really look at the construction of an eye, we are able to draw much more realistically.


To see some of the artist's tricks yourself, go to: http://www.portrait-artist.org/basics/index.html

http://www.portrait-artist.org/face/

Day of the Dead: Oct. 31-Nov. 2

Art Studio 6 students are making Day of the Dead skeletons. In Mexico, the Day of the  Dead celebration coincides with our Halloween. But unlike our scary skeletons, the Mexican celebration honors their ancestors with skeletons dressed in every occupation and activity you can imagine. 

Students studied movement by doing gesture drawings. Focusing on how knees, elbows, hips and shoulders move, students drew quick 15-30 second drawings of their classmates. Their sketches looked more like stick figures or skeletons than portraits as they captured the action lines of each pose. 

Students created armatures from tin foil, covering them with plaster-craft (the material casts for broken arms are made from) to create exciting sculptures. They mounted their sculptures on wooden bases and added props or costumes to create a character skeleton. Action lines make a sculpture come alive. Look for the bends in these sculptures backs, knees, heads, hands and hips.
to learn more about the Day of the  Dead Celebration, check out: http://www.azcentral.com/ent/dead/

"Read" posters for the library

Art Studio 6 made "read" posters for the library. Students picked out their favorite books, then posed with their books for a "celebrity portrait" to put on their poster. They studied emphasis, movement and contrast in designing their posters. Placing words and images on a poster in just the right way helps to grab a viewer's attention and focus it on the words you want them to read.

Posters are hanging in the library at the Parker Middle School. Art Studio 6 students want to encourage everyone to read. To see more celebrity read posters, go to: http://www.alastore.ala.org/

Inventing our own tools

If you were a cave artist, what would you use for tools? There are no markers, paints, brushes or pencils to pick up. How would you make marks, and on what?

6th grade students invented tools to draw and paint with by using found items from around the room. Painting tools were invented with toothpicks, Q-tips, straws, paper plates, beads, yarn and an assortment of items from our junk box. 

                                                       

Students answered these questions before drawing, then compared their answers to how they felt after they used their new tools: 

                                                          Do tools effect how you draw? 

                               Does your drawing come from your mind, your tools or your hand?

                                          Would tools change the style of art you draw in?

                                   Does the tool make the type of marks you thought it would?

They looked at Phil Hanson, an artist who creates art with unusual tools.  Sometimes he uses his hands, sometimes his feet, he may ride a tricyle across paper or create an image entirely out of matches or candles. Many of his images disappear after he has made them (like an image out of matches that burns up in the end) and so like Andy Goldsworthy, they live through his videos and photographs.

To see a wide variety of art made with unusual art tools, go to: http://www.philinthecircle.com//

Viewfinders: the way we see the world

Often when a student is faced with a scene, there's simply so much that's appealing it's hard to choose what to focus on. This is where a viewfinder comes in useful, as it helps you focus on particular parts of the scene, enabling you to decide what will make the best composition.

Like the viewfinders on the back of digital cameras, viewfinders limit what we see, focusing attention on the smaller image within the frame. By holding the viewfinder close to our eyes, or at arms length, we can see more or less of the image: like using a telescoping lens with cameras. 

7th grade students used viewfinders to look at a complicated still life. With viewfinders, they were able to concentrate on drawing a small section of the still life, and also focus how to compose it on the page. To learn more about using viewfinders in art, go to: http://donnayoung.org/art/sighting.htm

Composition and Principles of Art

    

Composition is the way art is arranged on the page. 7th grade students are learning how to create a pleasing composition by using principles of art. Is there an emphasis to the picture? balance? movement? Proportion?

Different principles of art focus your attention to one part of the picture first, and then another. Like composing a written paper, composition brings order to how an audience looks at your picture.

7th grade students are focusing on art principles while creating still life drawings, creating a composition that uses balance, emphasis, movement or contrast.
go to: http://www.goshen.edu/art/ed/Compose.htm to learn more about elements and principles of art.