Dale Chihuly

Dale Chihuly is always a student favorite. Interested in seeing more of his work? He has a great website: www.chihuly.com .

8th Grade Relief Sculptures

I love the energy I get from trying things that new. I recently presented the 8th graders with the challenge of creating an abstract relief sculpture. We looked at several different working artists to get ideas from them. The first artist was Carlos Molina. Carlos creates all kinds of awesome sculptures using just paper (the girls were especially fond of his page of shoes he designed....out of paper!). We then looked at Dale Chihuly (one of my fav's). Dale is a glass artist that creates wonderful abstract sculptures. To further prepare my artists for their project, we looked at some examples of relief sculptures. The results were fabulous! These artists created great works of art....I'm so proud of them!

6th Grade Blocks

At the beginning of the trimester I always take the time to show my students how to "gauge" (a drawing technique used to help an artist figure out the angle of an object). The 6th graders gauge wooden alphabet blocks (I'm going to start collecting these for my classroom....I love these blocks that much!). The drawings looked so cool that I decided to make it into a project. My artists start out choosing a phrase that means something to them. Next, they decide on the arrangement of their blocks, a fun font, and a cool background. We finish this project with oil pastels. The pastels really make this project, "pop"!

8th Grade Cities

I love teaching the 8th graders 2 point perspective. It's a project that looks really difficult, but as long as you can follow a few rules, its really not that hard. Several students will bring in cities that they draw on their own time to share with me. That's always such a rewarding part of my job! The basic idea for this project is that they have to create a city that says something about them. Some kids will just do the bare minimum, while others add all kinds of difficulty to make their artwork look extra cool! These are some of my fav's for this trimester!

Gestures

The 6th graders learned how to draw people by using gestures (a quick drawing used to capture movement of a person). The students worked together as model and artist, taking turns helping each other. Their only requirements were that there had to be 5 people and they had to be active. Some of there ideas were really creative! We had kids working on pictures ranging from snowball fights to playing baseball in the Milky Way! I thought these kids did a great job!

8th Grade Still-Life's

I always like to start each trimester with drawing. After all, I tell the kids that drawing is the ABC's of art. I feel so strongly about this that we spend at east 4 weeks drawing the still-lifes. Here I've posted some pics of some excellent still-life drawings. Enjoy!

Greetings from the art room!

I'm hoping to use this blogsite as a way to help you learn even more about art. I also hope to post several of your projects on this site, so check back often....you never know what you might find.