Value Drawing

This is a drawing that my SUPER advanced student drew my first year of teaching. He was the one I mentioned in a previous blog. He would ask for extra assignments because he would finish everything so fast. I wish I could really take credit for his drawing skills but he was obviously born with natural talent. What can take credit for is improving his skills. I taught him that drawing from observation is better than drawing from memory. I also taught him how to properly add value to make things look more realistic. I thought I had a picture that he drew from memory, to sort of serve as a "before", he had my class but I couldn't find it. His drawings were good before, but you can truly see the growth from the first picture he drew in my class to this one.

Mosaic Projects

These are from my first year of teaching. The first three were group murals made with mosaic squares. The last two were done by individual students. It's hard to tell the are mosaic because of the overlapping and lack of color variation. I still think they are nicely done, even if they are more "cutesy", than "artsy". I wish I could figure out how to post my blogs in specific catergories instead of just labeling them.

8th Grade Self Portraits

This is some more stuff from my first year of teaching. I was given full classes of kids who never had art and some who had more experience. I was frustrated that they would not seperate them into (Art I, Art II) classes so I separated my students within my classroom. These are some of the advanced kids work.  Also, I was given NO art budget and was pretty broke and could not afford to buy charcoal and prisma color pencils supplies for all 150 kids I had that semester, so only the advanced art kids got to use it. (I'm so unfair-I know!) Please excuse the glare on the photos, I wrapped them in polyester before I took them.

*The last three are from a brilliantly talented student I had. He was always way ahead of the rest of his classmates so I would assign him extra work, which he happily accepted. He also did a lot of work at home. On the gridded self portrait he did, I told him he had to shade in each square with a different value but was not allowed to have two squares next to each other that were the same value. The last one is in the style of Andy Warhol, with prisma color pencils. He did an excellent job on all his projects.
Great kid, polite, smart, and eager to learn. Every once in a while I get an email from him asking to critique an artwork or how to get dried oil paint out of brushes (yikes!) Sometimes I really miss teaching older kids....sometimes.

Yarn Name Designs

My first year of teaching I came up with this lesson. The kids started with a sheet of paper. I gave them rulers and started out with simple instructions. I told them to draw two straight lines and one curved line. I told them to make sure they "exited"the paper with some lines. Then I told them to add a few more lines of their own choice. I told them they had to incorporate their names somewhere. Then they picked a color scheme and filled in the rest with glue and yarn.