Linear Drawings

In Red 2 art we art starting to experiment with different styles of drawing. Here is a picture I did of my daughter and her friends using Linear Drawing. It uses lines to give your drawing shape, texture, and shadow. I am not sure how much my daughter will like this, but I an enjoying the concept of linear drawing.

Bookmark

This fall in our Black 2 art class we had to design and create a bookmark for our altered books. Each design had to include: the velvet covered matt board, wire, and material. I choose to use my hands as my design. First I got a fellow teacher to help me photocopy my hands so that I could look at them and draw at the same time. I drew and colored in the design on the back side. And then used a sharpie to draw in the lines on the front side. I used copper wire for one of my rings and one of my daughters toe rings for the other. I used a piece of lace as the cuff on one hand and then added a macrame` bracelet I had made a couple of years ago on the other hand.

Christmas Projects

I found this Joy banner when I moved all my sewing and crafting supplies into my new "creating room". I have it hanging in my living room. My mom loved it so much that I quickly made another one for her.

My students have been helping me make the Santa and snowman table decorations to sell to the teachers at our high school. I do the sewing and then they help me with the stuffing and gluing.

Each year we make some sort of project to raise money to use to go out to eat at a restaurant at the end of the school year. We spend a lot of time working on social skills in our classroom and one of those is how to order food and pay and tip a waitress and such. We are doing every thing we can to prepare them to go out into the world and hopeful not be taken advantage of. If you are just new to my site, I work with students who are educative mentally handicapped. While they are in high school, most of them are educationally on a 2 to 3 grade level.

Poinsettias

In our Red 2 art classes we are learning about Abstract Art. The students are learning the different ways to take things you see all the time and look at them in a different way, such as using minimizing or maximizing to focus in on one part. I took this picture of a poinsettia that I have, concentrating on only one flower head. I then did a painting in watercolors trying to concentrate on the veins in the flower and capturing the variegation in the coloring.

Impressionism Unit

In Red 2 art classes we are studying Post Impressionism. We looked up pictures of Monet's "Waterlillies".
We then did our own water color paintings of waterlilies. We learned how to use salt on the wet paint to get a cool effect in the paint.

Cubism Unit

In our Red 2 classes we have been studying about cubism. We learned how they took ordinary objects and moved them around, chopped them up, and added collage for the first time. Picasso was one of the leaders of this movement.

We took ordinary objects from around our classroom and drew them from un-ordinary angles.





This is a drawing of a bottle of 409 cleaner. I have collaged other cleaning images behind some of the cut outs, and then I watercolored my background.

African Art Unit

In Black 2 art classes we studied the African art of Kente cloth. How it was made, what type of dyes they used and who it was made for. We found it interested that they used river mud to dye the cloth certain colors. We then took a piece of Balsa wood and drew a design on each side of it. We carved the designs out using our pencils. Balsa wood is very soft and I didn't realize how easy it would be to carve (and break) the wood. After we had completed our designs we inked up one side of our Balsa blocks and printed that design on our cloth. We then cleaned up the ink, turned over our Balsa block, inked up that side and again printed a second design onto our cloth. The kids seemed to really enjoy this project and we had some really great designs from them.

Romanticism Unit

In Red 2 art classes we learned that the Romanticism period was a time filled with dark images. They were interested in war, storms, the dark side of life. We drew a white cloth that had been draped over something and all the lights turned out in the room to gives us lots of great shadows. This was a hard concept for the kids to try and draw the cloth in a way that showed the folds using light and shadow. I have to admit it was a little hard for me too.

Impressionism Monochromatic Unit

In our Red 2 Art classes we started learning about Impressionism art. We created a monochromatic print in this study. There was a glass placed on each table and we drew the glass on a white sheet of paper. We then placed a sheet of plexi-glass over the top of our drawing and painted on the plexi-glass with watercolors paints. Because this was a monochromatic painting the kids had to choose one color to paint the glass adding only white and black to that color for variations in the print. They could then choose a second color for the background. While the paint was still wet, we would lay a very slightly wet piece of watercolors paper on the glass and pressed gently. We then peeled the paper away to show our prints. Some of these took a couple of tries as the paint would dry before the students could get around to trying to print it.

Chinese Unit

As we continued our study of Asian Art, we had to find examples of ceramic pots that were created by Chinese artists. We then used these pots as a border to frame a picture we found of a Japanese or Chinese person. This had to be a print with a head shot in it. On the opposite page we used what we learned from the Sumi Ink drawings and used watercolors paints that had glitter in them. We painted dragons on our pages. We also had to find out how our names would be written in Chinese. I believe that I should have had my name running up and down instead of side to side.

Sumi Ink Unit

In Black 2 art classes we studied the arts of Asian works. We learned about the Japanese art of Sumi Ink Drawing. We painted with Ink on our papers using the popular designs of bamboo trees, birds, mountains. All of us agreed that it was not as easy to paint with ink as we thought it would be.

Aboriginal Unit

In Black 2 art classes we studied the Aboriginal Art of Australia. We learned how they make their art by taking the tail end of their paint brushes and dipping them in paint to "stipple" onto the canvas. We cheated and used markers, much faster than the art work we did last year using the painted method. I have to say that it gives me great respect for their art work. It is a very time consuming work that I found somewhat tedious, so I now have much respect for their chosen medium of work.

Renaissance Unit

In Red 2 we studied the Renaissance period and how the artists of that time concentrated on the body. We did some sketches of different parts of our faces and those of others in the room. We also had to take notes from our board work notebooks on different techniques used for drawing the different parts of the face.