Bread Art Project

Make art by designing a piece of artistic toast. Add it to the gallery and the Grains Food Foundation will add a dollar to Feeding America. Fun to do, and adds to a great cause.
http://www.breadartproject.com/#/home

Have you seen blabberize?

Take any photo and make it talk. It's insanely funny. Make Mona Lisa sing like the Beatles. Make The Scream whisper "I love you". It takes less than a minute to play with this site and you'll get hooked.
http://blabberize.com/

Teapots!!!

The sculpture classes have finished working on their construction techniques and are beginning to put them all together to make teapots. We are looking at artful teapots as well as various forms of spouts, handles and lids.  Check out the book, the artful teapots http://www.amazon.com/Artful-Teapot-Garth-Clark/dp/0823003191 and the fantastic images from the exhibit.

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=the+artful+teapot&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=7ODVTP-PHYP88AbbrcmUDA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=7&ved=0CFUQsAQwBg&biw=1196&bih=592

Fugleflicks: art videos by students

Tricia Fuglestad works with her students to create amazing films about art related subjects. We use them in class to remind us of some of the concepts we are using, and some of the problems we may encounter. Each short video (1 minute to 3 in most cases) high lights art terms, clean up methods, trouble shoots problems or encourages artists in their creativity.
you can view all of them at    http://fugleflicks.wikispaces.com/Fugleflick_Index


Art-iculation from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Art Babble: new video art site

There is a new site to look at videos about art called Art Babble.  http://www.artbabble.org/


Art Babble has different channels to find videos on specific topics. You can go to American Art, Contemporary Art, African Art, Artist Interviews, Museum Tours, Wall Paintings, Sculptures and many, many more sites. Or look up videos on specific artists, by going to a list of artist's names. See what's new in art around the world or view some of the world's oldest museums.

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/