High School Drawing assignments: Faces

In the process of developing drawing skills in addition to learning how to see and compose, We reviewed and learned basic picture taking skills (rules of thirds, cropping, angles, etc.). I sent my students outside to take photographs of each other for the project. 

The drawing skills they were going to review/learn were color pencil techniques (along with color theory), rendering with a 6B pencil, and brush and ink. 

The results are below. 

1. Make a color wheel and demonstrate shading with color

2. Make value scale with pencil and render shapes.

Student work in progress.

Making different values with brush, ink, and water.

Final Projects

Quick teacher example.

Grade 7 Art: Color pencils and 1 point perspective.

Grade 7 started off the year with a lesson on color theory, specifically mixing colors to create different hues, values, shades, and tones. First we reviewed Primary, Secondary, and Intermediate colors via making swatches and a color wheel. On the reverse side of the paper students drew shapes and rendered them using WARM, COOL, and COMPLIMENTARY COLOR schemes.

Color Wheel and Primary, Secondary, and Intermediate color swatches.

8 Swatches of mixing 2 or more colors together (student choice) to explore. 4 sets of shapes rendered using: Gray, Warm, Cool and Complimentary colors.

Applying color theory and rendering skills into a 1 point perspective drawing.

Middle School drawing project

Grade 8.

We stared this year on drawing skills. We reviewed rendering by producing a Value Scale and Shapes. Next we moved on to drawing eyes (their own) using a 6B pencil, tissue, blenders, and erasers. At the end the projects were taken to the library to be displayed. 

My new art room...meaning my old art room.

The story goes like this. 

When I arrived at Schutz in 2009 to teach MS and HS Art, the room needed some deep cleaning as it had accumulated massive amounts of stuff-pack rat style...saved containers of dried out paint and inks, brushes that were never washed and the like. It took a solid week to tidy up the place. The only part of the room I didn't touch were the blue walls which more or less was record for many generations of students and teachers. They were sacred and I respected it. 

When I left in 2013 the new art teacher did the unthinkable and maybe it needed to be done. She had the walls painted white. Decades of history erased over a weekend. My inbox was flooded with e-mails from former students and colleagues asking me if I knew what happened to the walls. Change is hard. 

I returned to Schutz in 2015 and there was one painting on the wall done by a student. There was hope. However, I left most of the walls bare last year. I had to let it sink in. I really didn't know what to do with the so-called blank canvases. 

A couple of days before class stared this year, I thought I should put some important universal art concepts up and center my teaching around them as the foundations for my middle school and AP art program. Meet the new old room. 

Elements and Principles of Art are a good thing.

Texture, books, and mirrors.

VHS Art videos, painted shoes, books, bric-a-brac, drawers...

Paper cabinets and Take 5 Art prints.

Someone had to stay after school. Tables got dry erase marker tops. Seriously. 

Image done by a student the year before I returned.

Supply table, drying rack, window, and cabinet.

Art closet aka cabinets, desk, phone, computer(s), speaker.

Scary sink area with curtain and stairs leading to the pottery room.

Next to the scary sink is a cove with bottles of Elmer's glue that look decades old. Wine and beer bottles that have been there just as long. No kids or adults have ever said anything about them. Funny, in the states you'd probably lose your job. 

An all-in-one paper towel-wash cloth rack that doubles as creepy stairs.

The clay studio view coming up the stairs.

The annex clay studio with 3 potter wheels. Note: we have a clay season. There is no A/C unit up stairs so we can logistically only work with clay from OCT-APR.

Shelves with glazes and clay tools.

Clay tools on top of an old wooden crate.

Walls and boxes of clay.

The kiln room.

another view of the kiln room.

Shelves for clay projects.