Congratulations!!!!!!! Scholastic Art Winners

2009 Scholastic Art Awards Winners!!
Parker students win 5 Art Awards!
We are pleased to announce that four Parker students won five Boston Globe Scholastic Art Awards in this year's contest! They are:
Julia Dudley-Kramer: Gold Key Award and Silver Key Award
An Le: Silver Key Award
Emily O'Sullivan: Honorable Mention
Sarah Parker: Honorable Mention
This is a very prestigious contest for students and we are very proud of each student who entered this year. Congratulations!

Murals Murals Murals in 8th Grade Art Studio

The mural bug has bit our 8th grade art studio students. We have a large variety of murals in progress around our school. We have recently finished some murals in the boy's locker room, and are designing ones for the girl's locker room. We have one pointing to the library, and designs that trickle down the stairwell from the eighth grade hall.

8th grade art studio works on a contract basis, creating a portfolio of work they design and impliment throughout the year. At the end of the year, each student will go home with a portfolio of their work, as well as short essays on subjects such as what makes a good artist, what are the best art materials, and who do I admire as an artist.

7th Grade Figures Class

7th grade figure class has been looking at movement and proportion in figures. We worked with gesture drawings, looking at how legs and arms bend, how backs twist and how feet support the body, and tried to make our figures in proportion by making the bodies 6-8 heads tall. Using wire armatures, we created figures in mid-action. Characters are in the middle of a leap, catching a ball, dancing or skiing off a ski jump. Each of these characters are in the air, and so we will display them by hanging them from a string or using wire to balance them in the air, above a base or a stand.

Using paper towels for the body, we are covering them with tissue paper skin and using cloth and twisted paper for clothing.

6th grade Art Studio Weaving

Making cloth is long and hard. No wonder children in the colonial age only had one or two outfits to wear. We couldn't imagine having only one pair of jeans and a T-shirt. But students in the art studio class can. They understand how long it takes to weave, and how hard it is to put a design into that weave.

Students have been working with cardboard looms, practicing simple weaving, and then working with needles to weave designs or letters into their cloth. Their final project is to make a clay wall hanging, where their weave is an intricate part of the art. They will use found objects such as feathers and sticks as well as yarn to create this interesting woven effect.

It's all about Balance

Sculpture students are learning how balance effects what they make.

We've all had Christmas trees in our lives that weren't balanced. Sometimes we tied them up, or tacked parts to the wall to create a better balance. But sculpture artists must make a piece of art that will balance on its own.

We started this unit by looking at the king of balance, Alexander Calder, who invented the mobile. He could take any tiny thing and make a balanced and most often, moving sculpture from it. Students learned about asymmetrical, symmetrical and radial balance, then practiced these in sculpture form. By puttting their first sculpture on a wire, they not only needed to balance it successfully, but needed to consider where the center of gravity was, how to increase the strength of the wire for heavier sculptures and how to create an interesting piece that would attract a viewer's attention.

Their second sculpture is an asymmetrical mobile, hanging from the ceiling or sitting as a table-top mobile. Calder made many humorous sculptures (a seal balancing balls, leaves blowing in the wind, a juggler) in his mobiles so that they had a theme as well as colorful balance. Our students must also have a theme to connect the ides of their sculpture. Some of our student's themes are space, growing flowers, monsters and arrows.

7th grade Art History through Landscapes

7th grade is looking at five styles of art from 1800 through 1950. By looking at these art styles, they are able to see how art changes as a reaction to what has come before it, and also as a reaction to the political and historical times it is created in.

Students will examine an art style closest to their own by completing a web quest. They will discover the rules of their style of art, and see how it fits into the political and historical surroundings of the time. They will work with their small groups to create a powerpoint or a podcast to present to the class. And they will finish their study by creating a landscape that uses the rules of their chosen style, but is an original work of art.

Students are beginning this unit by reading paintings to discover clues that will tell them about the art style and the time period it was made in. They are seeing how perspective rules help to create the illusion of space, and will follow up with lessons on one and two point perspective.

Egyptian Parody in 6th Grade

A parody is a work that imitates the characteristic style of another work, either for comic effect or ridicule.

In the 6th grade, we are working on Egyptian parodies. But you can't make a parody until you understand what you are making fun of. We are learning some of the most dramatic rules of drawing Egyptian art. Using at least five of those rules, we will be making modern ideas, drawn in traditional Egyptian style. Imagine an Egyptian skiing down a pyramid, or going to a mall, or an Egyptian rock star. By putting modern images into a painting that follows the old Egyptian drawing rules, we not only learn about the art, but transform it into a parody.

Some of the rules we are learning are:

How to draw people: face in profile, shoulders front, legs and arms in profile, eye facing front

Borders: geometric over organic

Perspective: Profile, Bird's Eye View, Frontalism, Mixed perspective

Stacking: one on top of another

Standards: like comic strip formats

Size Changes: the more powerful the person, the bigger they are

Horror Vacui: fear of empty spaces