Beyond the Border

This beyond the border art project is meant to explore the design principles of emphasis and contrast. Students illustrate some type of animal or insect and some nature in the composition with a square in the middle. Everything in the middle square should be in bright color and everything outside the square should be in different values of black and white. The entire animal or insect should be in color to create the illusion that it is breaking out "beyond the border." Students should use the rule of thirds to create an interesting composition while also exploring different colored pencil techniques.

Skeleton Drawings

These skeletons started as a practice in drawing positive and negative space. Students had to carefully examine the spaces in between (the negative space) as well as the bones (the positive space). After two classes, students began to add detail and value to the bones. To fill in the background space, I demonstrated how to use watercolor paints for a crayon resist. I let the artists decide how they wanted to paint the background. This is a great drawing project to teach the principles of positive and negative space as well as value and color contrast.

Abstract Sailboats

We began this project by learning about abstract art. We learned about Jackson Pollock and how abstract artists usually use color, shapes and/or lines to express a feeling or emotion. We then used crayons, texture plates and watercolor paint in cool colors to create an abstract painting. During the second class, artists learned about American painter Winslow Homer and viewed many of his different seascapes. We then created a blend of warm color paints- from red to orange to yellow to create a sunrise or sunset sky. The abstract painting from the previous week was torn up to create many layers of waves. The final class was used to create sailboats out of corrugated cardboard and white paper. This project was a lot of fun and covered many aspects of the curriculum-warm/cool colors, space and depth, Abstract art, seascapes and texture.