Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Oil Painting-facial expressions

"Your first oil painting won't be your best, but it'll be your most important one." This is what I tell my students when we start working with oils. I explain some of the similarities between oil pastels (what they used the previous year in MS) and paints such as the ability of mix colors together. I might have mentioned in another post that when we work with oils, make sure the room is well ventilated, wear gloves and use a vegetable oil to clean and thin the paints. The solvents in Egypt will zap the brain cells. 

Creating color swatches.
 
All together now.










Actual size.
 

Monday, October 2, 2017

Middle School Art Project: Spirit animals oil pastels.

The learning objective of this project was to mix 2-3 colors together to create variations of colors. This will prepare the students for working with oil paints in high school. We discussed layering and I had them create color swatches prior to starting on the project. To move away from working with a photograph or mirror, I had the students draw themselves based on how they think they look. It was interesting to note the neck sizes, lack of ears, shoulders, and other facial features they learned in previous years. All chose to draw the portrait full front, no one drew themselves from an angle-though one student did draw herself slightly off centered and smaller (I've included that below). Below is a selection of student outcomes.









Sunday, October 1, 2017

Middle School Art-color pencil junk food still lifes.

Every once in awhile, there is a surge to introduce healthy food at your school's canteen...it makes sense on many levels. Ideally we want to raise awareness and advocate for healthy eating and create less waste with packaging. Sadly, the idea falls dead to the will of our school's and perhaps country's cravings for packaged processed synthetic material we stuff into our bellies.

During open house I displayed the junk food drawings, one parent commented that it was cool the kids were drawing food they eat and not "old time-y still lifes of fruits and vegetables!" One of the buzz ideas floating around education is to make teaching relevant to the child's life. Here in Egypt there are little shops selling junk food every few meters...you can't walk far without tripping over boxes of chips stacked outside of one. It is relevant for sure-one only needs to look at the spike in diabetes and other diseases caused by what we subject our bodies to.








Middle School Papel picado-Mexican paper cuttig project

For the papel picado (Mexican paper cutting) inspired project we looked at the how to create shapes by creating a composition with negative space. Much like the mola inspired project we did the previous year, the concepts of working with layers and shapes still applied. I let the students develop their own designs-they were asked to make a couple of drafts so that they understood what pieces had to be removed to keep the overall design intact. This posed many problems where some students had to redo the top layer of the project. Below are the results.