Lessons for visual art education – where it's about the process, not the product
Category: 7th grade
Description of the Unit –
In this unit, students observed the traditional Japanese art of Notan designs, exploring the relationship between positive and negative space between elaborately cut designs, and how this relationship affects composition, balance and symmetry. Students created their own Notan designs.
Continue reading “7th Grade – Japanese Notan Designs”
Description of the Unit – To celebrate Halloween, students chose a famous painting featuring any kind of portrait, such as one of Vincent van Gogh’s or Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. They recreated the painting onto posterboard, cutting out the area with the face so that they could ultimately “wear” the painting as a Halloween costume!
Continue reading “7th & 8th grade – famous painting halloween costumes”
Activity statement – 7th and 8th grade students developed their pen drawing skills via the illustration of a landscape.
Description of the Unit – Students will observe and discuss Joseph Cornell’s memory boxes, and, gathering their own personal objects, found objects and other materials, students will thoughtfully create their own memory boxes.
Description of the Unit – When I introduce students to Cbabi Bayoc they often wonder about his “cool sounding” name. Where does it come from? His beautiful name comes from the artist himself. He changed his first name from Clifford to Cbabi, an acronym for Creative Black Artist Battling Ignorance, and, together with his wife, created a new last name for themselves, Bayoc, an acronym for Blessed African Youth of Creativity. Creative he is: Bayoc has worked his way from being a caricature artist at Six Flags in St. Louis to a renowned and sought-after artist commissioned by other notable institutions and artists, including the late musician Prince who commissioned Bayoc to create an album cover for him. Bayoc has also painted school and community murals, and in 2012 he took on one of his most ambitious projects, “365 Days with Dad.” Bayoc painted one painting a day that depicted a positive image of black fatherhood (all while raising his own kids) for the entire year. These uplifting, emotional paintings—such as one of a father swimming with his son, another of a dad reading to his child—has drawn praise from all around the nation, especially within the black community. Bayoc’s work is a testament to the positive influence an artist can have on a community and on the world, and he and his work should be studied and celebrated in our nation’s schools. Please visit his website at: https://cbabibayoc.com/
Activity statement – (Perspective and foreshortening)
One of the techniques that Cbabi Bayoc uses to great effect is foreshortening. I like to use three of his paintings of musicians to explore the mechanism and effect of foreshortening in two-dimensional art: Blues Man, Light Touch, and Serenading the Street. Observing the paintings, one notices how the use of foreshortening works to direct the movement of our eye, and to draw us towards a focal point.
Foreshortening places the viewer nose-to nose with the subject, especially in Bayoc’s work. The size exaggeration in foreshortening brings a sense of immediacy to the moment; we can hear the music being played, sensing the passion and concentration behind the music. Foreshortening in this case makes the action of playing music the true subject of the painting. Bayoc is inviting us to pay attention to the instruments and hands, but more abstractedly, he is asking us to pay attention to the music. In essence, foreshortening is emphasizing the music.
Students also observe the way in which two elements play a key role in how we relate to these paintings. Those elements are color and shape. The colors Bayoc uses are earthy, vibrant and alive, without being overwhelming. Some students have mused that the colors are used perhaps to emphasize warmth, energy and passion.
The features of the body and face are rendered through basic shapes, abstracting the figure somewhat to give us a more animated representation of reality. There’s an immediacy and accessibility to these paintings that seems to be the result of this slight abstract of the humans depicted.
Student work: A Foreshortened Self-portrait – I ask my students: “how can you depict yourself in a situation that requires foreshortening, and make it truly come to life?” This is a challenging project for the students, for in order to express foreshortening you have to have the correct point-of-view. It is important to spend time looking at other images that express foreshortening as well, and I like to pull up images of swimmers, basketball players and martial artists that express foreshortening and non-foreshortened postures to discuss the differences in perspective, point-of-view and distance.
Goals – Students should…
Understand:
Know:
Be able to:
Objectives – Students will:
Resources and materials – (Though not exactly a mixed media piece, I invite students to use any and all media below as they wish)
Questions –
•Topic questions (while observing Bayoc’s work):
•Association questions:
•Visualization questions:
•Transition questions (observing completed work by other students):
Evaluation – Did students:
Informal:
The following are student examples. I apologize for some of the shadows on these photos; we did this unit during the Covid pandemic, so students were at home, and responsible for sending me photos of their work, hence some of the shadows. What I enjoy so much about these pieces is how different they all are, from subject, to media to approach. It was such fun guiding the students through this unit and seeing the resulting artwork.
First, we have work-in-progress:
Next, these are completed artworks:
Description of the Unit – Students will create their own fashion line, featuring at least three different looks that share a unifying theme, be it color, pattern, line or particular article of clothing or accessory.
Description of the Unit – Emphasizing movement, balance and repetition with Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe
This unit revisits a second-grade unit which also focused on the Hourloupe to practice line and pattern; here we go further to practice the above-mentioned principles of design.
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Description of the Unit –
Students will learn and practice essential colored pencil techniques involving mark-making and shading to create a still life.
Activity statement –
Coloring with colored pencils can be a deeply rich and satisfying experience. Something about the feel of the medium as it is spread across paper, and then combined with other colors to slowly come to life, can be both thrilling and meditative. Given some basic techniques students can achieve highly rewarding results.
Description of the Unit –
Students will explore the monochromatic, rhythmic and balanced found-art assemblages of Louise Nevelson, and create their own assemblages both individually and in small groups.
Continue reading “7th Grade – The Art of Assemblage with Louise Nevelson”
Description of the Unit –
Students will first practice a variety of line drawing, or mark-making, techniques, and then use those techniques to render a landscape or still life in pen.
Activity statement –
Using photographs as a starting point, the objective of this lesson was for students to express changes in perspective, texture and value (light and dark) in a realistic drawing using a variety of lines, such as stippling, hatching, and cross-hatching, as well as varying the lines’ density. In this way they can transform a pen drawing into a realistic representation of a scene in nature. To help in this objective, students first created a mark-making chart expressing different types of lines, and discussed how the different types of lines could be used to represent texture, perspective and value.
In the K-8 Art Studio with Anita Sagastegui 