Big Brush Slippery Fish

I found this big brush in a tiny junk stall in Suzhou, China. I have no idea if it's actually an old calligraphy brush or just made to look so. Either way, I thought it was cool! My students agree, impressed by it's massive size. The handle is about a foot long. They took turns today trying it out.

 My attempt at copying these slippery, beady-eyed fish  with the big brush was not so impressive. It amazes me how sumi-e' can look so simple and yet be so difficult to do well. My inky fish slipped off the big brush, slug-like and lacking the lively flip and flop of this yin yang pair. Tomorrow, for my lesson on line, I will encourage my students to capture the essence of an animal in a few simple strokes with a small bamboo brush and india ink. I know the results will amaze me; they always do!

I love the red, rectangular stamp signatures on asian scrolls. I have some strips of thin foam material which the students can cut and stick on cardboard to create simple stamps. While they work on their individual 'signature' stamps I will invite a student at a time to take up the big brush  to swish and swoosh an 'S' of a fish on a long strip of butcher paper; together we will slip and drip some inky fish into a river edged in red print symbols.

A Helping Hand?

Like any teacher, I want to help my students as much as I can, however, if I thread one student's needle, I'll be stuck for the rest of the hour. The line will snake like a boa, encircling and ensnaring, constricting any hope I had of wandering freely among the industrious weavers in my art room and my students will limit their chances of gaining a skill. So, we practice the fold, pinch, jiggle method of needle threading. Needles with really big eyes, of course, make this process much easier.

Often I have students with various disabilities that make needle threading, cutting with scissors or other fine-motor, tool use, challenging. These students have so much to gain from fine-motor practice in the art classroom, but far too often, well-meaning adults step in and take away the opportunity to develop these hand skills. I sometimes have to ask a classroom aide to step back and allow the students to do the art project on their own. I try to explain that the process is more important than the end product. On the other hand, it is important to lend a hand or gently guide a hand  if a student is becoming too frustrated. At these times, I am grateful for another pair of adult hands in the room.

Whether working with children in a classroom or raising your own children, deciding whether to give a helping hand or encourage the child to do it alone can be difficult. If you thread all their needles you may be stuck threading all their needles. However, if you let them do it alone, while there's the risk of a pricked finger, there's also the possibility of moving beyond perceived limitations.

Scrambling to capture a three second pose.

 I am in awe of people who can take charcoal in hand and zip, flick, swish, three strokes and they've captured the human figure. During a recent figure drawing class I struggled to loosen up. Poses were held for three seconds, so there wasn't much choice! The teacher, witnessing my struggles, instructed me to use the side of my charcoal to blacken the entire paper. Then using just the eraser, I was told to 'find' the highlights. This was a fun exercise. Instead of defining the figure with line, I was freed to see the form. I'm excited to try this approach with my own students next term.

Drawing with eraser.

Self-Portrait

In this self-portrait my grim expression reminds me of old photographs in which the subjects, stiff and formal, appear to glare, lips pursed in anger, at the camera. Rather than capturing ill humor these photos reveal the discomfort and effort exerted to hold a pose for the duration of the long exposure time needed to record the image. That's pretty much my experience trying to draw my reflection in a mirror and hold a pose simultaneously!

Cheating?

My students sometimes ask if they can print out a picture of something they are trying to draw or paint. I usually let them. This is useful for reference.
Sometimes, a clever student will come up with the idea to hold their paper and picture up to the window and trace.Once in awhile a student will just cut to the chase, grab some scissors and paste the element right into their art work. Inevitably another student will cry "cheating."
But is it? I really think it depends on the artist's goals and the purpose for the project.
So, I made this pen and ink watercolor painting for a friend for Christmas and I cheated. In my practice sketches I was really struggling to get the roof angles correct. I was working from a photograph so I just printed out a couple in the size I wanted for my final painting. I cut the houses out of the background and traced the roof lines. Because my goal in this painting was to record a specific house, I wanted to be fairly accurate. In a different painting I might be more loose and less concerned with precise lines and angles. I hope my friend will forgive me for cheating!

Time Out/Time In

I took some time out, or maybe it was time IN. After months of planning and mountains of paperwork, I said goodbye to my students this fall and headed to China to add a child to our family. It was and continues to be an incredible adventure. Peaks and valleys. Luckily, my bag is weighty with tissues and treats, bandaids and bananas and the perfect portable paint and sketch kit put together by my wonderful mother.

visit Mom's site for pen and ink painting
 tips and techniques.

A second only to Hermione's bottomless bag!

My fave hoodie left behind somewhere in Guangzou

A Canal view in Suzhou

Colonial remnants in a Nanjing Garden

A Match Made in Heaven

"Oh, ick...." was the general comment from my 7th and 8th grade students upon learning that the subject of this painting by Leonardo DaVinci, Ginevra De Benci, was, at age 16, betrothed to a middle aged man. They had a similar response to viewing Michelangelo's David in its... entirety. 

Some aspects of our study of the high Italian Renaissance had my young teens squirming in their seats. However, the assignment to create a "match made in heaven" - or more accurately, on earth, by pairing the 17 year old David with 16 year old Ginevra, resulted in some fun art!

The drawing lessons included instruction on standard proportion as measured in head lengths, The Vetruvian Man, of course, as well as some gradual tone shading exercises. We also watched a few video clips from the fabulous BBC production, "Michelangelo the Divine." The students loved it - full of violence, blood and naked Renaissance cupids!

For the images pictured here I gave the students a photocopy of Ginevra and David's heads. They glued them on grey, buff or pink construction paper and proceeded to give them hair extensions, make up, glasses and so on. Then they decided on a contemporary activity and setting. The rest is history - love at first sight!

Accountability in Art: The Great Totem Spoon Test

Because NO CHILD should be LEFT BEHIND and  EVERY CHILD CAN LEARN and it is important to HOLD TEACHERS ACCOUNTABLE  for STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT and because ASSESSING COMMON STANDARDS AND BENCHMARKS is key to good instruction and clearly will BOOST PERFORMANCE so that we educators reach our nationally mandated goal of 100% PROFICIENCY IN READING AND MATH BY 2014 I ended the last term with a RIGOROUS exam during which STUDENTS DEMONSTRATED MASTERY of KEY CONCEPTS AND SKILLS by successfully eating ice cream using their totem spoon. I will admit that one head did roll, luckily not mine, and it was quickly reattached with super glue. I used this dramatic, TEACHABLE MOMENT to reinforce the importance of SCORING WELL and using slip, sometimes referred to as "clay snot" in room 301, when attaching clay pieces.

Beanie Babies?

Remember Beanie Babies? Once a collector's hopeful investment, their value has taken a nose dive right along with the value of the houses they clutter. I cleaned out a basement closet last week, filled a couple of bags and carted them off to school. (Don't tell my daughter, or teenage son, for that matter!) Don't have kids? Didn't join the beanie baby craze? No problem, pick them up at garage sales for about a quarter; fill a garbage bag with them at that price.

Why? Well, they are still incredibly cute, even my 8th grade boys loved this project, but more to the art point, they make great still-life material. They generally provide simple lines for the beginning artist to render and they display a variety of textures from their glossy eyes to their fuzzy fur. Teach contour line, form versus shape, shadow and highlights, and even color value. The drawings shown here were done with artist's dry pastel on plain old 11x18 construction paper.

Furthermore, the ability to pose these chubby critters, provides an excellent teaching opportunity to show students how to draw, for instance, the slumpy, little puppy, they SEE with their eyes, rather than the image of DOG which they hold in their mind.

Snow Gloves

Sideways snow,  I run from car to school blinded by stinging ice pellets. I'm greeted by the red blinking message alert: my student teacher sits awaiting rescue, car trapped in a ditch on her first day, poor thing. A rough start to a new term. It's January in Michigan. We burrow deeper into our parkas trying to avoid the pain of winter.

My family is gloveless this week  Lesson plans trump comfort. Cold hands a small sacrifice for an art project. I'm teaching the basics. Line defines shape, shading reveals form....we're drawing gloves. Learning to see. 

Outside it's a whiteout, cars crawl by in the snowy dark, red tail lights barely visible. Inside, my students, one eye closed against depth perception, are ants crawling along the contour of gloves, finding the mountains, valleys and cliffs of the outside line. It is a slow journey. We are trying to whiteout their mental picture of a glove: four fingers and a thumb. Although they can not actually 'see' all the fingers, they are smart. They know they're there. Not trusting my method, those extra fingers sometimes appear anyway. Amputation solves the problem.

As ants they forget about fingers. The landscape of a glove takes on a whole new geography. They begin to see the line, the line reveals the shape. The blob of a glove they've created seems disappointing at first. "I messed up" a common cry, looking at the odd shape on their paper, nothing like their idea of a glove. 

But now, half blind, I urge them onto the inner continent adding detail lines, texture and shading. Across the room someone utters a hushed, "wow" in awe as a glove pops from the white surface.

The blizzard is forgotten as we all consider this new reality of an ant's view. Somewhere down a dark snowy road my student teacher breathes a sigh of relief watching the tow truck lights approach. Tomorrow will be a great first day.

Painting Like Pollock: Abstract Expressionism

Parent conference days are quiet in the art room. By hour nine, after a mere ten visits, I was getting pretty antsy. On the up side, my room was cleaner than it had been in weeks and a solid month of lesson plans graced my desk. Three hours to go. I stood up and stretched.

I enjoy meeting parents. Earlier in the day I'd had a pleasant conversation with a parent who wondered if I'd had a chance, yet, to use the rolls of upholstery fabric remnants she'd donated from her work. Double whammy guilt! "Nope. Not yet," I shook my head and thanked her again for hauling all that stuff in. And, I reminded myself, I really needed to do something about all the 'donations' that were piling up, blocking a shared path to the computer printer.

Sighing, I headed for the printer room, determined to lug it all to my impossibly overstuffed storage space. As I grabbed the first long, cardboard tube from its place of honor atop the teetering pile near the printer, I was struck with inspiration, my upcoming unit was on abstract expressionism and the work of Jackson Pollock. Why not use all this fabric instead of poster board for the collaborative 'action paintings?' And why not use house paint instead of the expensive school acrylics?

Pushing thoughts of toxic fumes down into that rarely visited brain space housing theorems and postulates and other icky monsters, I flipped the 6 foot roll of fabric out along the top of a work table. Hiking up my ankle length, black dress I knelt down and dug around under the sink. I soon came up with a cracked, rubber spatula, a paint stirring stick and a few crusty brushes. An armload of old house paint cans, an apron for good measure and I was ready to try it out!

The next few hours flew past as I splattered and dripped, brushed and scraped, stopping a few times to hold a few conferences. Parents didn't seem to mind that I had to wash my hands before we could get started reviewing grades. When the announcement came concluding the evening's meetings I was sorry to put down the paint bucket but excited to share this next project with my students.

As I grabbed my coat and keys I realized with diminished guilt, that I'd only managed to move one roll of fabric from the tottering pile threatening to block the Gym teachers' access to the printer.

Visit www.funartlessonsgallery.blogspot.com to see all the students "Painting Like Pollock" art work.

On the Move: Drawing with Pastels

Tiny toys motivate. No matter how old the student, miniature, life-like objects fascinate. When my 7th and 8th graders enter the art room and see matchbox cars and planes, trucks and motorcycles set up at each table, they can't wait to get started.
We do a few color mixing exercises first, to get used to the pastels, to see how to mix and blend colors and to understand how to  change color value by blending in white or black and decide on warm or cool colors for the vehicle. Then I have them use a neutral grey  construction paper for their drawing to help emphasize the rich hues.
The only challenge with this lesson is keeping the kids from playing with the cars so that they don't disturb the still life set-ups between classes!