Chinese New Year Composition

High School - Art 1

For the high school Chinese New Year composition, I provided the students with several pages of Chinese characters, designs, cartoons and other Asian style illustrations.

From these they were to pick and choose and put multiple elements together to create their composition, altering any designs as they please to make it their own.


The final product had to be colored with color pencils.

Dragon Puppets For Chinese New Year

Middle School - Craft

The Chinese New Year for 2016 fell on Feb. 8th. It's the year of the Monkey.

We discussed similarities and differences between the traditional Chinese calendar and the western calendar. Each kid got to find out what animal they were born under. I also read the characteristics for each of the animals represented in the room, creating a few laughter among the group.

Halloween Monster Faces

Middle School -

This is the first Halloween project we've done this year: Monster Faces!

Kids start with folding a piece of card stock in half and cutting out a mouth - this can be in any style desired, with or without teeth. By unfolding the card stock and pushing the mouth part forward, kids then draw a face around it to create their monster(s).

Any Halloween / horror character was allowed.

 

American Gothic Halloween Parody

High School - Art I

For the Halloween season, I had the kids do a parody of American Gothic, Halloweens style.

This is the one time during the year where they are allowed to be as gory or disgusting or bloody as they want - surprisingly, most kids chose to be relatively tame, which is actually nice.
They could also pick a different theme if Halloween was not their thing.

We had pictures of the painting American Gothic by Grant Wood, as well as various examples of parodies I found on the net for inspiration.

Warm Cool Protractors

Middle School

The idea with this coloring project was to practice control of a color pencil, with shapes being colored in from light to dark and dark to light. We were also talking about warm and cool colors so that element was added to the project.


We simply traced multiple protractors onto the paper, keeping overlapping lines visible. In addition to going from light to dark in each shape, kids also had to change from warm to cool colors whenever they went over a line. Once done, we filled in the background with black tempera paint to make the protractors stand out more.

Surprisingly, most kids turned out to have a real hard time with this one. That tells me we need to practice proper coloring techniques more...

Alien Name Bugs

Middle School - Color Pencil

We've been talking about lines a lot lately, so I was looking for something for the kids to do with a colorful line background when I happened on an idea from another blogger - to have kids write their name in cursive and turn it into a bug.

We took that idea and went a couple steps further. First each writes his or her name in cursive on a folded piece of colored construction paper. Then they double up the lines to make the letters "bubble style".

Once the name is carefully cut out, taking care to preserve enough of the fold, the name is glued down, unfolded, onto the line background. Finally, the last step is to add whatever necessary to turn that name into an "Alien Name Bug".

Kids made a game to try and figure out who was who once all the projects were up on the board.

Optical Illusion

High School - Art I - Elements of Art: LINE

The year started off with a study of the Elements of Art, the first of which is LINE. Once the initial discussion and vocabulary is done, it was time for the main project. This year I went for a colorful Optical Illusion done in color pencils.

An other aspect of this project was to learn to control the intensity of the color pencil, going from light to dark and vice versa.

Requirement were as follows:
- The "ropes" had to appear 3-D with a highlight on top and shadows on the side.
- Color choices had to show some degree of contrast.