Teacher Letter

Dear parents,

I am pleased that your child/children have expressed interest to attend my art class.  Here my students  will learn much more about how to create and understand art.  Through the art making process, students will learn how to think critically, problem solve, express themselves, and to think creatively.  These skills will take them farther in their curriculum outside of the art classroom, and will enable them to succeed.

The goals of my classroom are to encourage my students to express themselves effectively through visual and verbal means while building a foundation of art knowledge, vocabulary, and skills through the Elements of Art and Principles of Design.  The students will also learn how to use these skills to observe and understand the world around them.

Their work will be exhibited every year at our student art show, where they will win awards and will be able to discuss their work with other students, faculty, and parents.  My students will also be encouraged to display their work at public galleries, functions, and even the State Fair.  I will personally compile a group of works to display at these venues as well, given the permission of the student and their parents.

Each lesson taught in my class will consist of a history lesson about a particular artist or movement.  The students will be able to identify works of art from moments in history and from famous artists all around the world.  They will also be given the opportunity to view historical and meaningful works of art from field trips to the local art museum.

I look forward to working with you and your children, and if you have any questions or concerns, you can contact me through the attached email address.

It's going to be a great year!

Sincerely,
Mr. Grant Erd

Color Theory

The basics of color theory for most of us, are learned from a young age.  We are told what the primary colors are, what the secondary colors are, and sometimes we might even learn the tertiary colors.  Basically, we learn how the color wheel is structured.  Once we reach high school we learn so much more, and even more in college.

When teaching color theory to students below the college level, there are many things that they probably won't understand.  But, to keep things moving in the classroom, the students can use their teachings to create a work of art that teaches them how to properly mix colors.  They can make their own color wheel using the primary colors, red, green, and blue.

Once they have completed their color wheel, they can then move on to the project.

The Project

Using a camera and Photoshop, the teacher will take portraits of each student, change them to black and white, and then use posterize to minimize the tone range.  Using a grid, the students will map out the shapes of color and enlarge them onto a larger piece of paper.  They will then use tempera or acrylic paint to blend a single color, of their choice, with white to create a monochromatic self portrait.

(work in progress)

The students will also have the option to use more than one color.  They can use complimentary colors, tertiary colors, or even polychromatic for those who are more advanced.  To achieve this the students must understand how to properly place color into the highlights and shadows.  Placement of warm and cool colors is an option.  The warm colors for the highlights, and the cool for the shadows.

Andy Warhol

This is a great artist to talk about when teaching this lesson.  He used the silkscreen printing process to achieve beautiful color combinations.  He's most famous for his portraits of celebrities, especially Marilyn Monroe.

Color Pencil

After drawing with graphite pencils for quite a while, it's time to move on to color pencil.  Shading with graphite and charcoal is very different from shading with color pencil.  With black and white, the shading is solely on the shapes of light and shadow, whereas with color pencil it's more about blending.

The students are going to need some practice with their materials before diving straight into creating a finished piece.  The most important thing to practice will be how to properly blend and lay down color.  With graphite pencil it's best to use a light touch when making contact with the paper, the same is true with color pencils, but even lighter.

The students will be expected to finish a worksheet where they will practice coloring and blending.  This worksheet should be started in class, with teacher input, and finished at home so that they will have plenty of time to practice.

Online Example

The lightness of pressure should be stressed as it is very easy to show the direction of your stroke with color pencils.  In our class, the worksheet was much smaller and less involved because of our time constraints.

In-class Example

The Project

There are many projects that can be done with color pencil.  Monochromatic or polychromatic portraits, abstract drawings, worm vs. cool color studies, etc.  Still life is another great project that would be easy to pull off in a classroom, especially since the students have already finished a still life drawing with graphite.  Working with color on the same project would allow them to practice what they already know, but with a different medium.

This still life however, should have at least one or two clear glass vases.  Since there is nothing to shade on a glass vase, the students will be forced to focus on shapes of color and their varying tints.  Some spheres or even spherical fruit should be incorporated as well.  This will allow them to focus again on light, shadow, and reflected light all over again, but this time with varying tints of color.

Online Example - Sari Gaby

Veronica Winters

Here are some student works that were shown in our class of different projects that can be done with color pencil.

Black and White Photography

A simple photograph can change drastically with different compositional strategies, and my students will learn how to use these strategies to their advantage in any art form.  Photography is different from painting or drawing in that the image is captured instead of created, this will allow the students to observe how different techniques can enhance or convey something about the image after the image has already been created.  They will complete a set of 5 photographs, each using a different genre.

These 5 photographs will be:

1. Portraiture - they must take a photograph of a single person, the face must be visible and the student will try to convey a specific emotion.  This can be through the person's facial expression or through the surroundings and lighting.

Irving Penn


Dorothea Lange

2. Texture - the students must find a single texture or multiple textures in one image and use contrast and lighting techniques to enhance the subject.
     
Lucy Shires


    Adrienne Adams

3. Landscape - the subject can be natural or constructed.  Techniques learned from the texture photography should be used to enhance the image.

Chris Clor

 
 Ansel Adams

4. Motion/Movement - the student must find a single subject to convey while the subject is in motion.  Cars, trains, animals, people, etc.  Exposure lengths will be stressed in this lesson.  Either the subject or it's surroundings must be in motion.

Massimiliano Sarno

5. Abstract - this will be the final lesson where the students will take everything that they have learned and put as much of it into a single photograph.  This can be anything from a constructed subject or of a subject close-up focusing on a single element.

Byron Jorjorian

Learning objectives:  

• How to effectively use composition, lighting and contrast to enhance or convey something about the image.
• How to plan your image
• How to use these techniques in different art forms

Questions:

• How can you change the emotion of something or someone through lighting and contrast?
• How can you abstract a natural subject?

Enduring Ideas:

• Capturing Emotion
• Life and Nature
• Abstraction

Litter, Litter, Everywhere

Painting beautiful scenes of nature and wildlife and then destroying the beauty by littering the landscape with multicolored shipping crates, Mary Iverson is a contemporary painter who has developed a very unique style of art making.  Her pieces are more like messages than they are paintings.  Her work shows massive cargo ships and shipping crates littering the Earth and destroying nature.

She wants to tell the world that mankind is ruining our planet, and that if we don't stop now, this is the environment that we will live in and ultimately leave behind.  This message comes through loud and clear in her paintings.

She uses perspective and vanishing points to place the objects into the space.  This technique allows the crates and ships to realistically appear to be a part of the landscape.  However, different from typical perspective drawing, she doesn't remove the lines and vanishing points, she does this to emphasize her notion that litter does not go away.

The Project

Influenced by Mary Iverson's work, this project will deal with how mankind is killing the planet.  The students will write a one page paper on why littering is so harmful and why it should be stopped.  They will be expected to research statistics and facts about littering in America.  This paper will be displayed with their work.

As for the artwork, the students will find an image of a landscape that they can draw and paint over.  This image can be a painting or a photograph.  The image will need to be scanned and printed onto a medium size piece of drawing paper.  The students will then use perspective drawing to include into the landscape different objects that are commonly littered.  They will research some of the most common littered objects and make a list of the objects that they choose to include in their drawing.

The image will be drawn over with pencil and then drawn back over again with pen for a darker line and higher contrast.  The students will explore perspective drawing and how to effectively use line and shape to render an object in space.  Once the drawing is complete the students will color over their objects with markers, colored pencils, crayons, or paint.  There will be no restrictions on which material to use for coloring, but the students will be expected to choose only one so that their piece will be consistent.

There will be emphasis on the elements and principles of design as the students work.  They will explore line, shape, color, space, value, and rhythm.

Classroom Example:

Still Life

Still life drawing is where all of the techniques from gesture drawing and contour drawing come together to make a finished work of art.  Still life is drawing from observation except the subject is typically of inanimate objects, such as vases, cloths, clothing, food, etc.  The goal of this style of drawing is to render the subject as realistically as possible, focusing on light and shadow and proportions.

In Practice

In our class we did this same exercise.  However, due to lighting constraints we had to improvise a little.

We started by drawing the outline of our subject with graphite pencils onto inexpensive paper.  Not focusing on detail at this point, the goal was to draw the outline and then trace what we have drawn onto a smaller piece of drawing paper.  Once the outline was drawn it was then drawn over again with a darker utensil, such as a darker pencil or pen.  This was done so that the tracing process would be more efficient.

After tracing onto the drawing paper, flashlights were placed strategically on each of our subjects so that we would each have quality lighting.  A picture was taken of each of our subjects and we were to draw the light and shadow over our lines based on our photographs.

Issues to work on

In the time that we had I didn't complete much of the shading process.  I wasn't focusing on keeping things loose and quick like the techniques learned in the gesture drawings.  Had I paid more attention to using those techniques, I would have gotten much farther with the drawing.  I learned that by being quick and loose you can complete the entirety of the drawing and then go back in and touch up the details and finish the work much faster.

In giving this exercise to students I will have to stress the same issues that I had.  I would encourage them to be loose and quick with the outlining, then go over that with the darker utensil but use that to draw the finished line and omit the inaccurate marks.  The students will be expected to be loose so that they can focus on accuracy later, but it will be stressed that they should not be too loose as this drawing is not timed and speed is not as much of an issue.  They will be expected to use what they learned from the pastel gesture exercise when shading their drawing and keep things simple, then later add more detail and accuracy.

Other Student Examples:

Gesture Drawing

It's time to sit down, relax, and scribble.  Gesture drawing is one of the best things to learn when it comes to drawing from observation.  It teaches you to look at your subject in it's entirety, instead of focusing on the details.

The best way to teach gesture drawing is to draw the human figure within a time limit.  Have a student stand in front of the class and strike a pose.  The rest of the class will have to draw this student in their entirety using only line.  Start them off with a time limit of 30 seconds, then draw another one in 20 seconds, and continue shortening the time limit until you reach 5 seconds.  This will show them that they have to be loose and quick.

The shorter the time limit, the more they will be forced to ignore detail and focus only on the pose of their model.

The Project

After the students have thoroughly explored gesture with graphite and charcoal, the next material should be pastels.  Each student should have 3 different colored pastels, one for each tone; highlights, shadow, and a middle tone.  This exercise will make them focus on the form of the figure but also shapes of light and shadow that fall onto the figure.  This should also be a timed exercise but much longer than the earlier drawings.  Around two to three minutes is best depending on how the students performed earlier.

The goal for the project is to contain the entire figure onto a large piece of paper, roughly 18 x 24.  First gesture the figure with the middle ground just like they were with the earlier drawings.  Once the figure has been established, go in with the the other colors to gesture the shapes of light and shadow.  Stress the importance of keeping things loose and quick.  Accuracy is not very important, but correct placement of light and shadow will be expected, as well as accurate proportions of the figure.

Student Examples:

Professional Examples: