ALL ABOUT ART CLASS SEPTEMBER 2008
Check this page for up to the minute information about art class in September!
7th Grade: (Illuminated Manuscript Pages/Illustration)
February (From Les Tres Riches Heures Illuminated Manuscript by the Limbourg Brothers, 1400's)
Students did a great job using the computer lab to research the way medieval artists made illuminated manuscripts! A big thank you goes out to the Walters Museum in Baltimore and their “Mummies, Manuscripts and Madonnas” and their interactive website for students. What a great resource! Students also borrowed lots of great visual ideas from online manuscripts thanks to the British Library. Students were coming up with inventive ways to appropriate (borrow) the images they found! One student will be using a Medieval Beastie as the logo on the basketball uniforms for the people in his illustration.
Next we move on to finalizing our composition for the parchment paper and choosing a medieval border for the illustration. We will learn how to blend, layer and burnish colors using Prismacolor Art Sticks and blending tools. Students will gain some skill creating the illusion of form by controlling the value changes of their colors. We will still stick to the Medieval Manuscript style: flat, out-of-proportion images but with lots of visual detail!
SEPTEMBER 4th
Students did a great job with their value scale, primary and secondary color translucency studies and using value to show form (turning a flat circle to a 3D looking round sphere while layering colors for richness). The initial drawings on parchment look great! The students are taking their time and putting care into their work, which I love! They are getting very inventive with their borders and are using art history books and the internet for ongoing visual research and references.
SEPTEMBER 11th update
Each day we continue to view one of the many animated illuminated manuscript stories from the British Library’s website. Students have become quite adept at spotting the stylistic conventions in medieval manuscripts, no matter what culture they were produced by: Everything looks out of proportion and flat, like it was cut out of cardboard for a stage set. There is an abundance of pattern, jewel like color and lots of detail.
We learned a bit more about color theory when students completed a worksheet on complementary and analogous color layering. They learned to layer and burnish color with the colored pencils so that everything looks jewel-like and intense. Many students are now in the inking and coloring phase of their illustrations. One of our objectives is to use color and pattern to create UNITY in our pictures. (Unity is a Principle of Design). I love seeing the creativity and flexibility of their thought processes.
SEPTEMBER 16th UPDATE
We are coming into the home stretch with our illuminated illustrations, and they are looking great! Every day, students add more detail and vibrant color. They are really putting a lot of care into their work. We should all be finished by the end of the week. Some folks out so much time into their designs that they may need a little more time. I will likely get students who finish soon to help me with the details of installing the display (making signs, designing the layout) for the hallway gallery.
I learned that the Limbourg Manuscript “Les Belles Heures”, owned by the Met in NYC will be UNBOUND and on display at the Getty in California, then back home to show in New York in 2009. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a stunning masterpiece of medieval illumination up close and page by page. For France, this book has as much artistic, historical and cultural significance as the Mona Lisa!
I emailed the curator and education liaison for the Met, and they were excited to hear of our work at Patapsco. They agreed to take the student’s questions about the exhibition. I emailed them off and am eagerly awaiting their reply!
September 26th Update:
Students have completed their Illuminated Manuscript Pages! We also received the answers back from the Met! There is a display of all student work on the large main gallery wall near the AM Patapsco studio in the E hallway. Within the next week, there will be a new link on the blog home page to a slide show of all of the student work plus the answers from the Met.
September 30, update:
All Illuminated Manuscript pages by students are on display in the E hallway right next to the AM PATAPSCO studio! My next step is to photograph them and get a link to the slideshow up on the blog’s homepage. I will put a notice in the Knight Newsletter when that occurs!
Nave of the Florence Cathedral. Can YOU find the vanishing point?
7th graders are now journeying into the Renaissance! We saw an informative film from the National Gallery of Art about Italian Renaissance’s sculptor and architect Brunelleschi’s scientific method for linear perspective and how this one “invention” revolutionized art history and continues to impact all visual art and communication today–from movies to comic books, advertising to fine art and more! Students have been practicing drawing geometric and organic shapes in one-point perspective (using a single vanishing point to which all lines converge) and then using value (light and shadow) across the form to create the illusion of three-dimensionality.
7th Grade students are also practicing mixing all colors of the spectrum using just the primary colors (red, yellow and blue) then creating tints and shades of each of those colors using acrylic paint. Soon, we will practice two point perspective then combine all of our new skills into a painting on canvas!
8th Grade: (Self Portraits from Photography, inspired by Chuck Close)
Self-Portrait, Chuck Close
Students learned about the life and work of American Artist Chuck Close. Students had some fun free-experimentation time with a wide variety of art materials in anticipation of choosing the medium(s) they might want to use in their portraits. We are in the process of approving the photographs we want to work from for our self portraits. Students decided on pose and point of view. Soon we will learn to create a 1” grid on our final paper. Students will receive a sheet of acetate with a 1” grid to place over their 8” x 10” photo. Like Chuck Close, they will draw what they see in the photo square by square. This method was used by Ancient Egyptians, and the Renaissance and Dutch masters.
Students did a great job drawing the grids on their final paper and really seemed to “get” the transfer process right off. Already, I am seeing beautiful line work. There are times when the room gets very quiet because the students are really focusing. We looked at 5 different self portraits by famous artists (Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Juan Miro, Chuck Close, and Van Gogh) and discussed issues like autobiographical visual narrative, use of emotional color, use of contrast and unity, point of view and compositional arrangement to create a specific message for the viewer. We will continue to investigate master artists’ decisions to inform our own choices about color, emotion, storytelling and composition.
SEPTEMBER 11 update
Well the drawings are looking fantastic. Students have been completing value and form studies in their chosen material in order to get comfortable for the next phase of drawing: taking the image from line to light and shadow. Many students are using paper blending stumps to get smooth transitions from one value to another. The portraits are starting to look much more realistic! I am very happy with their work.
SEPTEMBER 16 UPDATE
Students have been analyzing a variety of portraits from art history to discern what decisions artists made in order to convey a particular mood or narrative about their subject. Kids have come up with some wonderful insights. They described Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” as “silent”, Se argent’s young woman in white as “arrogant” and Warhol’s “”Jackie III” as “blue, dark and sad”. I am asking them to reflect upon what message they want to send about themselves through their portrait. We had an in-progress critique today in order to share first impressions of our work with each other. Again, students were insightful, helpful and respectful of each others’ work!
September 30, Update:
Students have completed their self-portraits and artist statements. All portraits will be displayed in the E hallway on the large gallery wall near the AM Patapsco studio! I will make a digital slideshow of work in the coming week to post on the blog’s homepage! I was pleased with the level of self-reflection that writing the artist statement provided for the students. Almost everyone seemed proud of their efforts, and many informed me that this was the very first time they had ever attempted to create a realistic self-portrait!
Red leaves pinned together with thorns, Andy Goldsworthy
As a change of pace, each class spent one 90 minute class watching part of Andy Goldsworthy’s film Rivers and TIdes. Goldsworthy is an intuitive environmental sculptor who uses only the natural materials in the landscape to create his on site sculptures. Photography and film are very important for recording his works and the transformations they go through when exposed to the elements. Students were given leaves and reeds to create either line or shape in a spontaneous way. We then went out onto the grounds of the school and found homes for our creations. The work was photographed and a slide show will be up soon!
Eagle Spirit Mask, Tlingit (Pacific Northwest)
Students are now just beginning a sculpture unit :mask making. We studied some images of masks from all over the world throughout history. Students will be creating armatures and using plaster gauze in an additive sculptural process. So far, their plan drawings look dramatic and exciting!
6th Grade: (Figure Drawing)
Our A.P. Mr. Jones, my student teacher Ms. Boone and one of our Instructional Assistants, Ms. Daily, have been our brave models as 6th graders learn to sight-measure the proportions of the standing figure. Right now, we are only concerned with seeing and drawing the simplest shapes we can. We are learning to recognize and overcome common proportion mistakes that new artists make when drawing the figure. Usually, young artists make the arms and legs way to short for the rest of the body. Students have been troopers with all the necessary erasing and re-drawing!
To lighten things up, we spent the 2nd half of class doing one minute gesture drawings in black and white conte on grey paper. Students were awesome models, taking great action poses. In gesture drawing you use a very loose, fast line, trying to capture the essence of the active pose! There were lots of smiles and laughter, which I love!
Students have been working with a variety of drawing pencils, from hard to soft, to create value scales and formal studies of spheres. Sounds a little dry to write it out, but the students did a great job manipulating value (light and dark) to create the illusion of form (3D) when transforming a circle into a realistic looking sphere. This is such an important exercise for gaining more control over the materials and one’s own technical skills. Most students seemed very proud of themselves, as I was of them!
6th Grade Oil Pastel (abstractions from nature)
Ernst Haeckel
Red Cana, Georgia O'Keeffe
Students started studying the work of Ernst Haeckel and Georgia O’Keeffe this week. We created composite drawings from scientist Haeckel’s incredibly detailed prints and analyzed how O’Keeffe used color, gradations and contrast. We have completed some pastel study worksheets to practice using complementary and analogous color gradations and selected which area of our Haeckel drawings we wanted to crop and enlarge for our final 12″ x 12″ oil pastel drawing. Next steps are to choose either a dominant warm OR cool color scheme and begin to add color and lots of gradations (to create visual movement) to our final work!
September 30, Update:
Students finished their oil pastel drawings and they are AWESOME! They will be put up on display in the F hallway starting next week, October 6. There will be a digital slideshow of work on the blog homepage too. I just can’t wait for you to see them!
Ancient Roman Mosaic of a Lion Head. Notice the more natural colors and the use of gradations for realism.
Invader Mosaic Montage. Notice the bright color, flat imagery and figure-ground contrast. Visit his site at www.space-invaders.com
Students also just finished a 3 day mosaic unit that is SO much fun! We compared and contrasted ancient Roman mosaics to the modern day street art of the Parisian graffitti artist “Invader”. His graffitti is MOSAIC based on the early digital imagery of very early pixilated video games. He has “invaded” many cities all around the world and produced maps of his work. Travellers are invited to search for them and collect “points” for each one they find. In his 20’s, “Invader” keeps his anonymity. He wears a mask or just isn’t shown in photos from the neck up. He uses ceramic tile and the little brightly colored tiles from rubik’s cubes. Each student designed their own invader, staying faithful to a rigid grid structure like early computer graphic designers. Students had to use the Principle of Design of CONTRAST to create an obvious difference between figure and ground. Students named their ceramic tile invaders, gave them points values and a few fun facts about their powers and favorite things! I was amazed that from 60 differnt kids, we got 60 totally different Invader designs! Wait till you see the slideshow!!
