art in the real world

My daughter is getting married in a few weeks, and weddings are a good time to remember your art skills. We use art for everything. What color should the bridesmaids wear; remember, it must coordinate with the groomsmen and the bride's dress. My daughter choose a red dress to be married in. So the dresses must work well with red. But not just red, a deep cranberry red. Light green wouldn't work well, nor orange. What were those analagous colors again?

Working with a flower arrangement means finding colors that not only fit the theme, but again go well with the dress choices and each other.

What colors will the tablecloths be? How shall we decorate the hall? The gazebo? Should they be symmetrical or asymmetrical decorations?

How will we design the photography? The bride is a foot shorter than everyone else in the wedding party, totally out of proportion with the rest. What can we do to design a good composition?

What we learn in art class, we use over and over again in life. Composition, color, proportion, balance.... These skills make our lives easier and more self relient.

What's a viewfinder?

A viewfinder is a piece of paper with a window cut out of it, that is the same shape as the paper you are going to draw on. When you look through a viewfinder with one eye, you only see through the hole. The rest of the world is cut off from your view. This way the artist can create a composition by moving the image within the viewfinder. If you don't like what you see, move it around until it looks right. Then draw what you see on your paper. Viewfinders help to block out information you don't need.

6th Grade Art Studio with Mrs. Davis

6th grade Art Studio students are beginning a unit on abstract art and composition. Abstract art is art that is distorted or exaggerated but taken from a realistic art source. We will look at Georgia O'Keefe's flower paintings, which take an extreme close-up view of flowers. By blowing up the flowers to fill the page or blowing them up further so that only a part of them fit on the page, the flowers become distorted , focusing on the colors and design elements rather than the subject matter. Students will look at silk flowers and photos of flowers through a viewfinder, designing a composition that explodes off the page in the style of Georgia O'Keefe. They will practice a variety of techniques with oil pastels, including working with oil to create an painting effect by melting the pastels together.

Success!!

Finally logged in! Can't keep up with Mrs. Davis' prolific postings, but have been revising ParkerArt for classroom use. The 6th graders are now working on a thematic project based on trees, and the newly learned Art Elements. Each student is creating their own "Element-tree" that focuses on using a variety of art element types and using compositional balance and movement. Kids are choosing their own media, which lets me learn more about them as artists and see what their experience and preferences are. The 7th graders are learning about art from medieval Europe in preparation for a unit on Renassaince art, proportion, and perspective. We are using the computer lab to view great online resources and will be creating gothic figure sculptures from paper mache. More later...time to go to school!
Ms. Ropple

Technical Difficulties

Ms. Ropple is having some technical difficulties with posting to this blog. In the meantime, check out what is happening with her classes by going to parkerart.homestead.com.  It's a fantastic website for research as well as keeping up to date with what your children are doing.

Thank you parents

Thank you to all the parents who came for open house last night. It was wonderful to meet you and to let you know about our plans for the year. We had a delightful response to our blog and promises of multitudes of "good junk" for our junk boxes. We hope you'll continue to watch what your children are doing in art as the year progresses, and take time to talk to them about the choices they make in these projects.
In art, it's all about choices and problem solving and how can we get the world to see what we are trying to express.

Elements and Principles of Art

We spend a great deal of time going over elements and principles of art with both the sixth and the seventh grade classes. Elements and principles are a language of art, a way to talk to someone about a painting or sculpture without just saying , "Yup, I like it" or "No, that painting stinks". It gives people a common vocabulary to talk about not only the materials and the marks it is made of, but what the artist does to bring you into and around the image itself. It gives you a common language with which to judge the art, and to question the intent of the artist.

Elements of Art
These are the simple building blocks that make up a work of art. Just as molecules are built from tiny elements such as atoms, art is built from the elements we use to make marks on the page. These elements make up the way a painting is created. Elements can be lines, points, shapes, colors, textures, values, patterns or space.

Principles of Art
The artist uses principles to control the elements on the page. Principles of art allow the artist to manipulate the viewer to look at a specific spot, and then to move their eye about the image in a particular way. It may be by creating an emphasis of color in one area, or creating a rhythm of straight lines in another section. The picture may be pleasing because of the symmetrical balance used, or because your eye moves from one side to another following the spirals in the starry night. Principles of art allow a viewer to see what the artist feels is important in their art work.
Principles can include balance/ imbalance, harmony/contrast, emphasis/de-emphasis, movement/rhythm, perspective/depth, proportion, unity and variety.