A sketchbook look

I'm going to share more of my sketchbook with you folks. It houses a lot of random things and thoughts. It's always on my desk and I use it a lot, especially to test colors while I'm painting. So here's a look in. I have a bajillion sketchbooks. This one I've had since November of 2012 I think. It's full. I need another. I have about 20 filled journals and sketchbook on my bookshelf. I can't help it. 

This was with my computer's webcam, so eh, the text is backwards. Oh well this time.

From the first day I got my gouache paint. I didn't want to go to bed. I felt jipped that for all these years I didn't know about it.

 More from my first date with gouache. Had to do some birds of course.

This page? I don't even know where it came from.

Ya that's a bearded baby.

The day I got a bottle of neon yellow paint. Love neon!

This page in particular...I remember drawing all of things while I was feeling overwhelmed with all of my household duties. I was drawing all this stuff that consumed my life at the point and now it seems funny.   Among it all included the tv show The Office (all time fan here), laundry, sweeping, feeding our boy, blowing bubbles, and cleaning binkies. It's a beautiful life, ha.

This last page I've used as a palette many times when I didn't feel like getting a real one wet. Ya I'm lazy a lot with my paint use.

One day my husband and I had a little drawing session together. We decided we would draw a nerdy bird.  I want to frame his.

Visual puns

I came across this guy Phil Jones  and on flickr. Lots of funny a cool t-shirt designs that I would love to wear that have great visual puns.

Back when I was teaching we did a visual pun project that they thought was hilarious and I did too.  I had a professor that was the queen of puns. She would just make them up on the spot in conversation. A little cheesy, but we loved her for it. So why not do this in a drawing?!  If you're wondering what a pun is... ( I had to get a clear definition for myself...)

Pun: play on words, usually the assignment of different meanings to similarly sounding words or phrases, with humorous intent.

Lately I've been doing a little of this with my own drawing. It's so fun! I'll show you some of my stuff later.

It made me remember that I meant to share my lesson points here on the blog from a long time ago and time got away from me. So here you go!

The assignment: create your own visual pun.

We start off we some art history.  Rene Margritte painted the Treachery of images which is a pipe and below it in french it says (translated): This is not a pipe.

Good question and discussion time. What does his mean? Is it not a pipe? They think for a minute and give some silly answers. Sometimes they come up with the correct one. If it's taking a while I ask: This is a painting, so could you use this pipe? Nope. You cannot smoke the pipe in this painting.  It is an image, a representation of a pipe, but it is not a pipe.  Ding light bulb! Classic visual pun.

This is a great time where we discuss how art is so often a depiction. Junior high artists especially get hung up on whether something is realistic looking or not. If they are drawing a hand and it doesn't look EXACTLY like their hand, they are defeated. They compare their artwork and others to the realistic standard. "Well that's not a good tree because it has rainbow colored leaves." What?! (An actual comment by a 7th grader).  I love to break it to them: art does not have to look like real life! Wow, what a revelation for some of those kids. Anyway!

 Assignment: The pun you choose to depict can be chosen from the list provided (below) or one you come up with on your own.  Think of a word or phrase and then depict it literally.  What would an actual hot-dog look like? A dog sunbathing?  Fast food?---food running at lightning speed!

I provided a list of random words to my junior high kids to get their brains thinking in terms of puns.  To adapt for high school, you could do some examples together and then let them come up with their own.  I haven't tried this with elementary students, they might have a hard time getting the whole "pun" concept. But no harm trying!

Watch Dog
Fan Club 
 Second Hand Store 
 Water Closet 
 Strong Box 
 Photo Bug 
 Bookworm 
 Loud Tie 
Toothpick 
 Gatorade 
 Handcuffs 
 Horse radish 
 Fireman 

 Wisdom Tooth 

 Mail Man 

 Boxing Match

 Book Worm 

 Moth Ball

 Garden Hose 

 Horse Fly 

 Eye Ball 

 Handball 

 Football

Grandfather clock

Butterfly

Firefly

Trucker hat

Fire drill

Fruit punch

Then I had them do this worksheet to get the creative juices flowing:

After this they were ready to roll and eager to start on their own. I gave them a 9"x12" standard drawing paper and they began. They were allowed to use pencils, colored pencils, and markers. I was very clear that if they did NOT write the words they were illustrating, it was automatically a loss of 5 points.  Sometimes it's really hard to tell what they were trying to do!  

Anyway they turned out great. At the end of the project I had them each come and show their drawings on our projector and see if the class could guess what it was. I have images of their drawings somewhere on my old computer and I haven't transferred my photos into a better place. So unfortunately, no student examples here. But there are plenty of other great ones from the web I can show you!

Swine Flu haha by David Zinn

Crabapple

Burger King from Devianart

I don't wanna taco 'bout it 

So there is so much out there! Check it out, make your own. What are some your favorite words to play with?

Still Life Drawings: with food and candy

The thought of a traditional still life bores me..and my students to tears.  Sure there are some good ones.  But after visiting a workshop with artist Kent Christensen I got the idea to do a still life with candy! 

His artwork kind of pokes fun at our society's obsession with food so we discussed that as a class.  There are some great conversations you can have about food! 

I love a lot of things...art, sports/working out, and food.  I workout so I can eat! My students are pretty much the same.  I told them all to bring their favorite food, but it had to be non-perishable so that it would last through our project.  I didn't want moldy sandwiches in our cubbies!  

I bought lots and lots of candy/cookies after Halloween when it was on sale so that the people who forgot to bring food would have something.  (You've gotta prepare for that with junior high kids!)

We used the still life of candy to learn about composition.  

We talked about a closed versus open composition, the rule of thirds, asymmetrical vs. symmetrical, and creating rhythm through drawing multiple objects.  

I gave them a colored ground, gray construction paper. They used colored pencils to draw their food.  We ate on the last day of the project.  Who doesn't love eating in class? It's a real treat for them.  This was so much fun!

Here are some of their drawings:

Art activities the last week of school

What do you do the last week of school with your students?

Keeping students engaged the last week (and myself to be honest) can be tough since they are wired and springing about singing the tunes of summer.  All of their work is graded and finished so what are we to do? I planned several fun art projects for us to do that were both FUN and could be done in a day or two.  You don't have to be an art teacher to do these projects.  Sorry for my crummy photos. Today was the last day of school (happy summer dance!) and all my good pictures are on my school computer.

Here was our schedule:

Monday: Make TAPE sculptures!  It's pretty easy, there are tutorials online for this. I'm sorry I didn't get more photos of the process to explain it all!

Tuesday: Finish tape sculptures and display them in the school in random places.  We posed some with clothes from lost and found.  Our tape people sat on the benches and were flying through windows.  They were hilarious and all the other students walking by thought they were real people. I didn't get a picture! Shame on me!

image from artplace4kids

Wednesday: Bring sticks. Dip them in ink and draw on big paper! Do it outside in case you spill!
                                 

Thursday: Drawing contest outside with sidewalk chalk
                                            

Friday: Last day! Sign yearbooks and run around like crazy

These final 3 projects are some of my students favorites.  I like to end the year with a bang. I try to take them out to do sidewalk chalk art when the weather is nice either in September or May.  The inbetween months in Utah are TOO cold! Or unreliable.  Whatever you do the last week of school, make it memorable!  That's the last time many of them will be in my class so I want it to have a lasting impression on them.  Have a great summer everybody!

Funnest project ever! Sidewalk chalk: "I wish I could..."

70 degrees and sunny? Play outside at school? Don't mind if I do!  Such pretty weather called for class outside. Luckily art class let's you do that kind of thing =) We did sidewalk chalk! But with a special goal in mind.

In the past I had done sidewalk chalk drawings with my students, but I really didn't know what to tell them to draw.  It was sort of a free for all and I'd end up with people writing junk like "i love justin beiber" and "ur mom"  (right outside the principal's office!! Bad Mrs. Chinn, very bad)

So rather than us drawing random crap, they had to draw their answer to "I wish I could..."  This was my favorite day.  I was inspired by this photo I found on pinterest:

After they finished their drawings, I went around with a ladder the custodians let me borrow so I could get a decent perspective over them.  I think climbing up on the ladder for pictures gave me a small phobia of ladders. Scary! But worth it for fun pictures. Check it out!

Sketchbook assignments: Paint with markers

My students just turned in a sketchbook assignment where they could choose to paint with markers or do a gesso transfer.  There are lots of good tutorials online about gesso tranfers to check out. This one is pretty good.
                              

Most of my students chose to do the marker route.  I'm ok with that, they had fun with it.

This is how you "paint" with markers:

Don't have watercolors? Scared of them? No biggie! You can use crayola washable markers (really any water based marker).  This was a happy accident that happened during my student's collaboration project.  I love the effect as the marker bleeds.  Simply draw what you want.  Then you can use a wet paintbrush to bleed the marker.

 You can also use paint.  As you use paint over the marker, your paint and marker colors will blend together. So fun! Plus there's practically no clean up.

I love the way these sketchbook assignments turned out. This semester of students have really embraced their sketchbooks.  Good student assignments= happy teacher.

7th grade value drawings

I remember in my art education doing lots of value scales. One teacher had us do value scales, but that was the extent of our value "drawing."  Seriously learning how to add value to a drawing and making it look 3-d is a like the number one thing my kids want to learn.  So we spend some time practicing and then I let them do a landscape or a self portrait, both just pencil.  Some things that helped them be successful:

1. The landscapes had to be drawn on 12 x 18" paper. The portraits were done on 8x10" paper.  I did it this way so they would be more evenly yoked in their time for completing the project (since the portraits were a little more challenging for them).

2. I gave them drawing pencils. I bought a class set of a range from H to 6B.  Each day I passed out one to each kid. It was their ticket out of class. If they didn't give my pencil back they didn't leave.  I only had one kid lose a pencil.  Plus when they know they're using good materials, they treat their work as being more valuable.

3.  I was looking for at least 7 different values.  They kept a value scale they completed so they could compare.

4. We watched lots of good YouTube tutorials about how to draw parts of the face.  Prokotv has some pretty good ones.

5.  I took their pictures for the portrait.  Their home photos don't get the shadows that they needed.  I set up a little photo booth and took their pictures. Then I was sure it was good quality.

6. For the landscapes, I taught them about texture and 5 keys of a good landscape:
-proportion change (things get smaller as they are further away)
-value change (things are lighter that are far away)
-detail change (things close to viewer have more detail)
-values (at least 7 values should be present--dark to light)
-overlapping (things overlap!)

I'll include the specifics later, but check out what they did! I'm so impressed.  I was a little worried to have 7th graders do this, but they turned out great.

I noticed that the landscapes did not turn out as well as the portraits, mostly because the students who chose to do the landscapes wanted to go the easy route and were scared of people drawing.  But it was a good accommodation for those students with IEPs or other struggles.