Thursday, October 30, 2014

Oil pastel figure lesson differentiated for High School


  A little while back I posted a successful middle school lesson
I did using oil pastels and wood figures. 
The high school art teacher I work with recently used the lesson with her Drawing and Painting I class. The high school students used white 18 x 24 paper (I used 12 x 18 with middle school) and made them really big. The added challenge was to include a complementary color background to make the figures really pop. They are awesome!



Monday, October 6, 2014

deconstructed circle collaboration


Thank you Zamorano! I used Mr. Masse's art lesson as the kick off lesson for my eighth grade. All of my middle school lessons at the start of the year were connected to the Van Gogh quote, "Great things are done by lots of small things brought together." This fit perfectly! 

Students designed a 9" circle using with oil pastel and watercolor resist. 
They were pretty good sports about cutting their nice circles up, and were really pleased with the end result. I'm going to have 7th grade do a series of circles to build off of these. 






My introductory images included:

Advising the student's to look up Talavera tile designs on their ipads, 

 Maritza Soto's quilts 


this lighthouse quilt 


and this nice example of radial symmetry 
to trigger the student's memories of the radial designs they did last year.
At the end of last year, these students made work inspired by Indian Rangoli street painting. I put them on the wall at the art show. There are tons of fun videos of the chalk painting tradition on youtube and it's a great example of empowerment for women through art. 





Wednesday, October 1, 2014

pinterest boards, spreading the lesson board love

Hi everyone, happy October!

Just a quick note/pinterest PSA- if you a pinterest-er who followed one or a couple of my lesson boards a long time ago and didn't "follow" me you might not realize I have added a whole bunch more in recent months and recently re-organized as well. I like to follow fellow pinners and then unfollow particular boards that I'm not interested in so that I automatically get the new boards.

I have noticed a lot of action via my pinterest account and pins recently and figured I'd put it on your radar.
How did we ever organize lessons without pinterest?!