What's up with us Wednesday

In an effort to post more often, I'm gonna keep it simple today and give you my what's up with us wednesday.


1. My husband rented us mountain bikes and a child carrier for my birthday so we could bike Provo Canyon. Isn't it just beautiful here?!

2. The angel Moroni statue on top of the new Provo city center temple was put up. I'm so excited to see it finished!

3. My twin brother had a bet with his work buddies that he could lose 30 pounds in 9 weeks. If he didn't make weight, they were going to shave his head.  Based off of this lovely picture below, can you tell how he did? He did lose 25 pounds though! Go Todd! I wish I had a picture of the wacky haircut he got before this. It was pretty epic.

4. LDS General Conference was this month. I needed it. I can't remember who said it, but it was said that one purpose of the scriptures is to give us faith in Jesus Christ.  I've been hanging on to those words. I wouldn't call myself faithless, I'm not. But it was a good reminder to me that I need to immerse myself in the scriptures and get some more faith! So I have a new goal for myself which I'll share later. :)

5. This may seem silly, but I was really excited to go to the doctor yesterday. For years I've been dealing with some skin issues that won't go away!  I'll spare you the embarrassing details.  And I normally don't take pictures of myself, especially with my back showing. But this gown they gave me is awesome! It had a tie around the waste so your butt wasn't hanging out everywhere! Genius.

6. I've solved some issues I was having with print quality this week. Hallelujah. And I had plenty of prints to mail! I love what I do. 

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?

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!

Collaborative project: 7th grade line drawing

I wanted something up on the walls by parent teacher conferences a few weeks ago.  I had only had my students for about a week, not enough time to make much. So in one day we made some massive butcher paper abstract line color drawing thingies for the hallways.  I looove them! They are so bright and colorful.

All of this was done within a 45 minute class period.  Each of my 7th grade classes made 4 long strips of butcher paper pieces.  We talked about line and color a bit and then they traced a partner with crayola washable markers.  Everyone in the class was traced, making sure to overlap their bodies (not while the other person is still laying there of course).

After the lines had criss-crossed everywhere, making lots of shapes, I told them to start filling in the shapes with different patterns of line.  Sort of like a zentangle. They did this for about 8 minutes and then we brought out the paint! 

I use these tempera cakes palettes a lot now.  It's quick clean up, they last forever! The brush comes in the palette. I used to hate tempera and I still don't like the texture much.  But when you have 35 students and 3 sinks...the less clean up the better.

After filling in with lines, they started painted inside the shapes.  Because we used crayola washable markers, when the wet paint touched it, the markers started to bleed, but I loved the effect.  It was a welcomed accident.  So in just 45 minutes, we had lots of huge colorful papers to hang on the walls. =)