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?

I quit the day job, for now.

So I'm sharing my own personal stuff today. Especially because it's summer and teachers are off! Plus I quit. What???? You quit Mrs. Chinn!? My last day of teaching was in May. I received an outpouring of love from my students and former students.  It was bittersweet. I love teaching, that's not why I quit. I have a fabulous little 16 month old boy who needs his mommy to teach him :) When last school year started he was only 5 months old. It broke my heart to leave him.  It'll be nice to be with him for a while. Who knows when I'll go back and teach, we'll see.  I'd love to explore some non-public education teaching settings like teaching at a studio or maybe even private lessons. Who knows?!

Here's the reason I'm home.  Oh those big baby blues. It's hard to not kiss him every second. Sorry students, I love ya but I got a bigger role to fill right now!


The past year I've had a crash course in illustration while illustrating a book for my dad's cousin.  It's been quite a learning experience since I am definitely not an expert. I've been exploring different illustrating processes and ideas lately. I REALLY love it. Children's illustration blends what I really love: kids, humor, art, realism with a flare, and story telling. Why wasn't I aware enough to study this in school?

I've been playing around with animals lately.  I pick an animal, say a fish or shark, and then draw it lots of ways and add things to it. It's a fun game my husband and I play together too. I love to see what he comes up with (he's not "trained").

Scrapbook paper is really fun to play with too. I have a ton of it. Rachel why do you keep buying so much paper? You don't scrapbook. But there are so many fun patterns and colors, paper eye candy! Especially when it's on sale!  I'm trying to put it to good use. I'll be experimenting with paper craft illustration which I'll show more later.  Right now I'm cutting out simple shapes and making scenes with them, then drawing around it.  There's something really relaxing about cutting and pasting stuff.

I'll still be posting lessons and artwork plus I'll be including plenty more! Anything that can be made, I'll probably put that on here. Happy summer everyone! I'm off to the water park!

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!

How to make a tape transfer

Packing tape is for more than just packing up boxes.  I accidentally over-ordered packing tape last semester...I have about 5 boxes full of them.  Ridiculous. Totally over estimated! You can also make tape sculptures with it which I post about later.  

But for today's packing tape feature...how to do a tape transfer!

This can be done for so many things! Make decals for your windows, for a kid's room, for art projects, whatever.  It's fast and easy.  This will not work with ink printed from a regular inkjet printer. It has to be from a laser printer or magazines.  

You need:

one roll of clear packing tape

scissors

a magazine or laser copied image

water

 Find the image you want.  The only thing that will transfer onto the tape is the ink.  So white paper won't be there later.  Put the sticky side down on the image you want to transfer.

 Add more if you want.

 Flip it over to the paper side and run it under water to soak the paper.  You can do this immediately after sticking the paper and tape together.

 Then using a wet sponge or your fingers, start carefully peeling off the paper from the tape.  You want to rub hard enough to get off the paper, but not soo hard the ink comes off. Although that is the beauty of transfers is that rubbed off quality, do it to your liking.

 You can cut shapes out of it and stick it anywhere! In college I made a bazillion tape transfer butterflies, I just couldn't stop, I loved them.  I assigned my classes to do this for a sketchbook assignment. They thought it was the coolest thing ever.

I'm not the expert on this of course, there are lots of ways to do transfers and I don't know them all.  I do know you can do this with gesso (but it doesn't work with magazine) and gel medium or gloss medium works too.  Any others ways you know please share!

Art teacher vs. artist

I find myself struggling a lot to complete my own artwork. I'm illustrating a book right now which is super fun.  But since I'm teaching art all day long and usually demonstrating how to do the kids' class assignments, I don't feel as motivated to do my own art later at home.  Sure I try to do my own stuff during class, but when you have a pesky 7th grader asking you questions every 5 seconds...it kind of interrupts the creative process.

Any of you art teachers deal with this too? How do you get out of the slump of school artwork vs. your own artwork?  I'm excited for the summer so I can be to my own thoughts, but that's only a few months of the year!

Plus I have this fear that my own work isn't good enough because I'm in the junior high art mindset so often.  I don't want my art to be junior high art. Seriously I could do my own art show right? But wow that's putting yourself out there to be critiqued and what if "they" don't like it?! Scary! I need to get over my own fears and just do it, but how? I want to.  I've always regretted not getting my BFA.  Ugh.  One day I'll get an MFA maybe.  For some reason when I was younger I had this idea in my head that artists are not successful and I needed to do art where I could have a "job." I wish I would have had more people around me that could encourage me that YES you can be an artist AND make money.  Don't get me wrong, teaching is fulfilling and honestly I think I'm pretty good at it.  But a part of me wants to just be an "artist" with no other responsibilities.

How does one be an art teacher and an artist?

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. =)