8th grade Art Studio

Eighth grade art studio is a time to find out about yourself as an artist. Students are working on a year long slideshow that includes their work and their thoughts about what they like in other artwork. By examining their own work in a critical way and by looking at what they admire in works of others, in specific materials and in what artists have to say, they discover more about themselves as an artist.

Most of the students have chosen to work in clay this term, although we also have life size drawings of sports figures, popcycle stick cities, murals, collages and drawing studies in progress as well.

Before beginning their art, each student must think carefully about why they want to make their work, answering questions such as:
What is the theme of your work?
How is it different than any other work you have done?
Why is this valuable for you to do?

Upon completion, students must do a self critique, considering the following questions:
Describe: Wht did you create? Did the project stay close to the original plan or did it eveolve into something else. What elements did you use in it and where?

Analyze: Is the composition good? What art elements and principles ae working the hardest in your piece to express your idea?

Interpret: What meaning does your project have for you? What do you want the viewer to see in it?

Judge: What parts of the project are most successful and why? Are there any parts that you wish you did differently? Explain.

6th Grade Talking Walls Projects

Do walls talk? If they did, what would they tell us? Who built them? Why? Can you imagine a world without walls? Talking walls, based on the book of the same name by Margy Burns Knight , is a project that introduces children to cave art and a variety of cultures through looking important walls from around the world.

Sixth grade students looked at cave art through a variety of books and videos and discussed the 4 main theories of why people think they exist. They experimented with making drawing materials and paints, and created their own walls by covering ceiling board with plaster. They looked to their own lives to find meaning, and painted something that was very important to them on their walls. Some students choose to paint their pets, others a great family vacation. Some children focused on their love of sports and others painted themselves reading their favorite books.

We looked at compositions of cave artists and talked about elements of art that these ancient artists used. They carefully designed the compositions of their own walls, taking care to use principles of art to draw your eye to the art and make you linger over it by using emphasis, contrast, movement or color. Students then put a varnish over their art so that the work wouldn't crack and fall off the plaster, as did much of the ancient work in the Lascoux caves.
The students finished with assessments such as: How did the plaster effect the way you drew?
What kind of brushes work well for what type of painting? How did your wall compositions differ from those of other artists?

Georgia O'Keefe and 6th grade Arts Alive

The sixth grade Arts Alive group have just explored oil pastels and the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. Georgia O'Keefe takes realistic items and abstracts them by making them very large and simplifing their shapes. Students looked at how oil pastels can be manipulated by coloring one pastel over another to make rich dark colors, as well as blending them so that subtle colors saturate a white area, giving it a richness far greater than white alone would do. They experimented with using oil to melt the pastels, giving their work a painterly effect and drawing over the oil to bring color back to an area that became too transparent. They did an excellent job of looking closely at values, and using three values in each flower petal. Each petal consists of the color of the flower, the color of light shining on the flower and the color of the shadowy areas.

Students then choose a new subject and used their new skills to draw that object.

Working from a real object requires concentration and obserservation. Abstracting from life, requires even more focus on the lines and shapes of what they are drawing. These students took the time to look, and their work really shows their results.

7th grade perspective

Seventh grade students have been working with one point perspective, creating rooms, cities, shadowy names, hallways and imaginary lands. Perspective is an illusion to show depth or distance on a 2D surface. There are many ways to do this. We all know that things look smaller as they are farther away. Things also fade in color, and tend to look blueish as they go further back. This is called atmospheric perspective, and was used extensively by Leonardo DeVinci. How many times have you looked at mountains and seen the blue haze color in the distance? You can also show distance with overlapping items, one of the simplest ways of showing one thing in front of another.

One point perspective is a specific technique to make things look as if they are receeding into the distance in a specific direction.

Two point perspective allows you to look in two directions on the same page. Often these images show the corner of buildings or tables, allowing you to see both sides at once.

Students are taking their assessment tests now. Can you answer these questions?

What is a horizon line?

What is a vanishing point?

What does point of view mean in terms of perspective?

How do you show perspective with size?

How do you show perspective with color?

How do you show perspective with overlapping?

How do you make something in one point perspective? Two point?

Why do we write artist statements?

Artists make art for a reason. It may be that the flower they are looking at is exceedingly beautiful. It may be that the colors reflected in the cliffs at sunset are so subtle that they take your breath away. It may be that they want to voice a regret, or stand up for a cause. There are as many reasons for making art as there are artists. But when you ask a student why they made something, the answer is ususally, "I don't know".

Why don't they know? Maybe it was the first thought that came to their mind. Maybe they just grabbed a picture and copied it. Maybe they started scribbling, and it turned into a picture. Kids don't often delve into why they like things or why they choose to create a specific image. An artist statement requires them to think about those reasons. To look at what brought about these choices, and later changes in their art. Art is a reflection on them, and whether or not they made an actual choice, the viewer will assume that they did. Kids need to realise that their art makes a statement about them, as well as their subject matter. An artist statement helps them to think about those choices.

Predicting vrs. Observing

By the time they get to middle school, kids know a lot. Their minds are constantly filling with information. In order to move to the next thing quickly, they learn to predict. What is the teacher really looking for? What is going to happen next? What is the story trying to tell us? Their minds are dealing with facts and figures and calculating what the next question will be.
But this makes learning to draw difficult. The mind, in its hurry to move on to the next lesson, tries to anticipate what you are seeing. If you look at a vase, your mind registers that it is a vase and drops in a symbol of a vase in your mind's eye. But in art, we can't work with just symbols. Sometimes we need to draw a specific vase, this one right before you. We need to rely on observational skills to get that right.

One of the lessons we try to teach students is to observe. In order to do that, they need to look carefully at details, slow down their thinking (so the symbols don't replace what they are looking at) and draw slowly. We teach them to move their hand in sync with their eye, following the outline of an image as a contour line drawing. By learning to observe, students not only become better drawers, but they learn to notice more, to see what others are doing and feeling and to be better witnesses when the need arises.

That Ah Hah moment!

It happens in many fields, that ah hah moment when suddenly everything comes together in one clear thought. But it happens in art a lot. So much of art is trying things out, trial and error, until you find something that works. I love that moment when a student adds one more thing to a sculpture and says ah hah! The underlying words being "that is just what I needed" or "now I know the story I want to tell" or "that works, now it's balanced....". If you listen carefully, you can hear little gasps around the room as discoveries are made and thoughts come together. It's a joyous sound, one of my favorites, because I know how happy I feel when it all comes together for me. It is one of the greatest joys of being a teacher, to be present when these discoveries are made.

Visual Brainstorming and Compositional Brainstorming

Sounds tough doesn't it? But for such complicated sounding words, they actually are pretty simple.

Visual Brainstorming-

Visual Brainstorming means working out ideas in images instead of words. If you are brainstorming things that you like, and you like your dog, then you would draw a picture of your dog rather than write down the word dog. We are so used to using words that we often find it hard to translate the words into images. But if you are using pictures as a way to express ideas, it is easier to go from one picture idea to another. Visual Brainstorming is all about thinking in images. Just like regular brainstorming, you fill a page with ideas before choosing one to work on.

Compositional Brainstorming-

Composition means how something is put down on the paper. Is it big? Is it small? Do you use texture, line, color? Where? It is composing a picture, using the space so that it looks visually pleasing. Compositional brainstorming means placing the image on the page in different ways to try it out. Would it look better really small or really big? What if it went right off the paper? What if I turned it horizontally? Can I add more things in this corner? When students draw their final drawing right from the start, they may not have thought things through. Compositional brainstorming gives them time to consider size, shape and space before they decide what their final work will look like. It's a form of brainstorming that allows for revision of ideas. Art is often spontanious, but art is also carefully thought out in order to best portray an object or an idea.

6th Grade Beauty

Finally online again -- I am feeling out of the loop on this project so far. I've been unsuccessful logging in 95% of the time and Mrs. Davis is a much more prolific blogger than I am at this point! Go Mrs. Davis! Let's go Ms. Ropple!!

Grade 6 classes are finishing their Element-Trees, which feature three different examples of each of the Art Elements (see Mrs. Davis' previous post!) They are so lively and fun, and remind me of the beauty of unsophisticated art done from the heart. The art features bold colors, simple shapes, limited perspective, and zany ideas along with an expressive freedom that typifies elementary art.

As students continue on their developmental path, that free vision sometimes gets obstructed in favor of self criticism about what the art is supposed to look like -- and that is reality! Shapes have to be PERFECT, and lines need to be equally smooth. If the eyes on a protrait don't match, it's not a good thing (even if the sitter's eyes are clearly different!) Kids sometimes gravitate to the "I can't draw" mantra and dismiss their previously acceptable efforts as being horrendous evidence of their lack of talent.

We often tell students not just to look, but to see what's really there. To ignore symbols they understand in favor of creating images of what they actually see and can only comprehend by looking. This is a difficult skill tied in with physical developmental changes, and can be a source of frustration for students. Research has shown that students who stop receiving training in art during this transitional time remain fixed in the style of schematic, symbolic representation. When I hear parents say "I can't draw and I am a terrible artist" or "My kid doesn't get their talent from me!" I wince and realize that their art training probably stopped around 7th or 8th grade. If not, maybe they just haven't found the right medium or message yet. But that's another issue!

Back to students, usually in the 6th grade, who start to see reality and recognize their art has some visually inaccurate features. It is so important to not toss the baby out with the bathwater at this point -- with an increased sense of perfectionist expectations and self-criticism, enthusiasm for making art can fade. At the middle school level, our challenge as art teachers is to help students appreciate what they can do, and not devalue their individual gifts for choosing materials, developing ideas, and arranging elements within a design. We have to guide them towards new growth and the development of new skills while not extinguishing that creative spirit in the face of their sudden increased personal self-criticism.

It is a great moment when a student notices that part of their picture isn't accurate and takes steps to correct it on their own. Instead of explaining their lack of talent or relying on someone else to tell them to do it, a student who trusts their own art skills and accepts their own skill level enough can criticize their own art and learn to make it better -- learn from the teacher, another student, through experimentation, and hopefully and eventually, by seeing for themselves.