What Will They See in an Old Shoe?

My thirteen year old son has enormous feet. They rip through sports shoes in a matter of months. Tripping over one of his castoff, man's size 12 shoes last week gave me an idea for an end of the year art project. At first I thought I'd stumbled over one of the two cats in our house. The shoes are that big and our cats are that fat! It was dark, 5am, I was barely awake. I looked at that shadowy shoe, at its creased and molded shape, it stared back at me, daring me to challenge its right to front stage center on the stair landing: a 3D Rorschach test that NEVER gets put away.
Old shoes do have character which is why the "Draw an Old Shoe" pencil project is a classic that's been around for decades. A nice, quiet, clean end of year project! At first I thought I'd just bring in a few shoes, set up a still life at each table and assign the pencil drawing, but one of the issues I have in teaching drawing and gradual tone shading is that a lot of kids can't get past the colors, logos and details of an object to see the form. They just don't "read" highlights and shadows very well at first.
So, on Wednesday, while students were wrapping up a printmaking project, I got out some old yellow house paint and proceeded to paint a shoe to see if making it monochrome would help reveal highlights and shadows. As expected, it did, but unexpectedly the painted shoe, or rather the act of painting the shoe, was what really caught the students' interest. "Can I do one?" they asked hour after hour as they caught sight of my mustard yellow transformation.
Out the window, like a birthday balloon, went my idea of a quiet end of the year drawing project and in the art room door came boxes and bags of old shoes. The pile grows daily as teachers and parents respond to my email request. Gallons of leftover house paint have joined the swelling, smelly pile of worn out shoes. Eager art students ask me daily, "When're we gonna paint the shoes?"
What will my students see in these shoes? Not the house cat, I'm sure. We're stepping into new territory and we're going to figure this project out together. What I do know is that the pile of shoes has captured their imagination and THAT is one giant step toward a successful end of the year project.
p.s. After we paint the shoes (all 50 or 60, rather than the 5 or 6 I had intended!) I will have them do that ol' stand-by: the pencil drawing. What happens with the shoes after that?...check back and I'll let you know!

"All Thumbs" and a Few Toes Too

Last spring I decided it was time to tackle the large walk-in storage closet adjacent to my art room. The walls are lined with boxes, some of which, judging from the contents, date back at least thirty years- well before my time! Some of the labels match the contents: cat food cans, door knobs, paper towel rolls. Some are mystery boxes.
One such box held a few rolls of plaster cloth of the sort for casting broken bones. Not enough material for all four of my art classes, unless we did something really small.
The idea for this project sprouted along with the seedlings I set under grow lights awaiting the memorial day weekend outdoor planting date. I was thinking about green thumbs and my mind went on from there: all thumbs, thumbs up, thumbing a ride, Thumbelina, thumbs and toes, tip toe, toe to toe, ten little piggies, hang ten, well, you get the idea. It was silly, but that was our theme.
I dragged out the boxes of wood scraps, invited students to plaster a thumb, a toe or in this case two sets of toes and build a sculpture. Some were 'figurative', some were abstract, all were radically different from each other and lots of fun to do!

Picture Books with 14 Year Olds? REALLY?

In the late 80's, much to my surprise, I found myself teaching 2nd grade in Los Angeles. I never planned on becoming a school teacher but after art graduate school, in the middle of the last great Recession, there weren't many options for those of us with MA's in studio art. (Are there ever?) LA needed warm bodies- no degree required- so we signed up. Little did I know that it was the beginning of an odyssey in education- no destination in site- now almost three decades in.
I didn't know much about teaching at first. I went to school at night for the piece of paper that certified that I knew what I was doing, but really, I learned on the job and it was my students who were the teachers. The first day of school the students taught me the pledge of allegiance in Spanish. The second day of school they taught me some cool clapping games. On the third day of school they taught me the power of a story shared.
Admittedly, I was a bit at a loss as to how to productively fill six hours with these active and eager eight year olds. At home, after the exhausting but exhilarating second day of school, I dug through my childhood boxes and found the book, Frederick, by Leo Leoni, about a mouse who, rather than help the mouse clan gather nuts and seeds for the winter gathers words and colors: an artist making his contribution.
The next morning as I gathered the children around me I hoped "Read Aloud Time" would help pass a quiet ten minutes or so. Half an hour later the children were still debating the fairness of Frederick's actions. There were those who felt Frederick should have helped gather some food, and there were those who believed that Frederick contributed what he could. And finally, there were the children who felt Frederick should have gathered some food along with his words and colors. Eight year olds it turns out are very passionate about fairness.
Although I've moved on to colder climes and older students I still read picture books aloud now and then. I have many favorites, such as Ruth Vanderzee's Mississippi Morning which I use with my mask making unit, but I hadn't shared Frederick with a class since teaching little ones. I came across it recently and decided to read it just prior to my artist biography unit, and guess what? Fourteen year olds gather around just as eagerly for a story and are just as passionate about fairness as eight year olds.

Dangerous Art

Next year's seventh graders came to visit today from our 5/6 middle school. They looked so small! The first group entered the art room just as I was demonstrating how not to gouge a finger with a linocut tool. I was being rather dramatic, explaining that they could cut their finger to the bone if they don't follow the safety procedures and use the bench hook properly. The little 6th graders looked so scared! Art can be dangerous...but also fun, I assured them.
I asked the visitors to look around the room and pick something they'd like to do next year. I have a lot of abandoned art everywhere and one of the favorites today turned out to be the life sized rocker in gold glitter boots pictured here. Not only was this a favorite pick of the 6th grade visitors today, it was a hands-down favorite of art students last year.
To create these figures students worked in groups of 2-3. This project followed a figure drawing unit where we learned proportion. Students drew an action figure on a large piece of corrugated cardboard from various boxes that I scavenged.
Finally, they created a palette of colors by tearing up magazine pictures into inch sized random shaped pieces sorted by color in small resealable baggies. The action figures were then "painted" with these small mosaic pieces and white glue. Shadows were created with darker values of colors. Skin tones were built up with a wide range of colors. Features were both 'built' mosaic style and cut out whole from magazine pictures.
This was a particularly successful end of year project with my 8th graders who were ready to move on and move up to high school. They loved working in groups, socializing while they worked. The only dangerous part was cutting the cardboard figure out with craft knives, but no blood was shed with this one!

Dreamweaver Nightmare Almost Over!

"Thumbnails" what a cute name for little pictures. I learned a cool thing today on my path to website development. I knew about thumbnails, of course, but other than making a little picture in photoshop I really wasn't sure what to do and I had the complication of trying to turn a large Powerpoint document into thumbnails.
Turns out (Thanks Mom!) that it's pretty easy to do in Photoshop. Theres a nifty feature called Automation that enables you do some fun things. First, I saved the Powerpoint as a pdf, then I converted the pdf to psd files via Photoshop Automations, then I used the Web Gallery feature in Photoshop to convert the psd files into instant jpegs all set up for the web complete with links to the larger images in a folder. It was a snap to insert these jpegs into my Dreamweaver pages!

From Durer to Die Brucke to Crazy Critters

The talk in the teacher's lounge last Thursday was all about how nuts the kids were. It was the last of day of class before spring break. I had agonized the night before about my lessonplans. If I followed my carefully planned sequence we were set to make Cornell Notes on a slide lecture about the role of the German Expressionist group, Die Brucke, in updating the woodcut process by using linoleum.
The students had completed an internet visit to the Brucke Museum the day before, following a lecture on Albrecht Durer and woodcut printmaking earlier in the week. I didn't want to lose this learning, but more importantly I didn't want to lose my students' interest.
Thinking about Durer's wonderfully imaginative woodcut print of a rhinoceros, which we had examined for his use of line to show texture in the rhino hide, gave me an idea for a fun and silly project that had the potential to hold the student's interest. It also had the potential to bomb! Would they think it was dumb? Well, it was dumb, so I told them that right up front.
After a quick review of the previous day's learning we started our silly project. The students folded their paper in fourths, and were told, without explanation, to draw the rear end of a four legged animal in the first box. This was good for a chuckle, at least.
Next, they folded this portion in to hide the first drawing and handed their paper on to another student who was to draw the mid-rear section with two hind legs. By now I thought most of the kids would catch on to what we were doing, but it turns out that what I thought was a classic elementary school activity was unfamiliar to the vast majority of my students. My lucky day!
We continued folding, passing and drawing, with admonishments not to peek. By the last section they'd caught on and were buzzing with anticipation. And, of course, when they finally unfolded the drawing it was great fun to watch their reactions.
Turns out the activity was a bomb, with laughter exploding all over the classroom!
(The project we're leading up to, after the break, is "Fins, Feather and Fur: Animal Textures in Linocut prints." Look for complete lessonplans this spring on my website, FunArtLessons.com)