Introduction to Portraits in Art History

Last week, in Art class, I finished teaching a unit on Still Life and began a Portrait unit, starting with some of the most famous portraits in Art History. We discussed everyone from Rembrant to Picasso, Valesquez to VanGogh.  

Rembrandt, Margritte, and Vermeer paintings came to life in my Art Class

My students picked a favorite painting to personify, and dressed up as the subject. It was a lot of fun tryinig to scavenge for beads, black t-shirts, gauze, crepe paper, wigs, hats, fabric, and flowers. I brought Halloween make up and scarves from home Monday morning and between that, the box of prom table runners, and another teacher's supplies, I was able to get the students what they needed to put a quick costume together. By Tuesday, almost everyone had been photographed. 

We had no shortage of Frida Kahlos and Mona Lisas. Lichtenstein style portraits were also popular. But I was impressed by students who took initiative like the girl who brought a short dress and long skirt to dress as Sargent's Madam X.

These students pose as Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Munch paintings

The Makin Macon Art Project

Ocmulgee River runs through the park on the edge of Macon on our giant community made map

California artist, Kiel Johnson, who has made art projects all over the world including projects for Disney, Vans, and TedTalks. His latest project is called Makin' Macon. He painted a giant, almost accurate map of Macon on wood and brought it to the Wesleyan College's Leadership Lab, where the entire community was invited to help make iconic Macon buildings and houses to add. Sky lifts, dog parks, ferris wheels, and enormous cat towers were added as locals used their imagination.

Our totem poles stand in the sensory garden near a flagpole, bird bath and a couple pavilions

GAB Art students were invited by the director of the Leadership Lab to participate in this community project, and so we did! We made GAB's Admin building, Hendricks Building, Green House, Cottage Six, Sensory garden totem poles, a bus, and the gym. Some students used their imagination to make towers. One student made the twin towers on 9/11, while another made a chocolate palace. The project will be featured at the Leadership Lab on Cherry Street, Macon through October, so bring your family and add to the fun!

One of our dorms, the greenhouse, and the gym

Original building designs from boxes & blocks

It's fun to place for my students to show their work starting the very week that their show came down at GA College and State Universiity. And there's more to come because just as the Makin' Macon project comes to an end, my Art students will decorate a tree at the Museum of Art and Science. I'm so proud of these young people for being a positive part of our community! 

 

Value Still Life Drawing with Graphite Middleground

Using gray paper as a middle ground is a great idea, if you have gray paper and white colored pencils or pastels, but you can accomplish the same goal with a white sheet of paper and a pencil and eraser. I taught my students a technique using graphite as a middle ground in this drawing assignment of a highly reflective still life.

The trick is to learn to use soft pencils (4B-8B work well) and control the amount of pressure to get various values. For the middle ground, hold the pencil almost horizontally, I even hold it like I'm picking up a pencil off the floor so that I can get the side of the pencil point. Then I draw lots of lines close together going one direction, then another, on top of that, and then maybe even a 3rd and fourth, until it looks like overlapping patches of woven fabric. Rubbing a crumpled paper towel in circular motions can blend fill in any patchy spots. 

The drawing can be done on top, with any mistakes being erased, and then grayed back into the flat starter surface. Lines are hopefully turned to edges and planes as value is onto an object or surface by shading with a pencil. Highlights and lighter areas are created by using an eraser as a drawing material. I like the white plastic erasers like Mars for this task.

value drawing by a totally blind student

Because my students are visually impaired, we stuck to two or three objects per student. This allowed them to have a personal still life that they could see or feel right in front of them. My students who were completely blind actually traced their objects with Wiki Stix. They barely stuck to the graphite long enough for me to trace their "drawings" in hote glue and then they followed instructions as to where to shade and where to erase.

At the end of the day my students were able to tell me that artists create the illusion of space through use of value, vertical placement on the page, objects overlapping, by making closer objects larger, and through the use of perspective. I think this drawing assignment helped reinforce these concepts, and gave them another technique in their "value drawing" toolbelt.

 

GAB Student Mini Exhibit at Georgia College and State University

My students from last school year were able to start school year off with a resumé line thanks to Art Professor Forrest. He hung a min-show of their work in Ennis Hall at GCSU. It is always nice when you can get a little mileage out of student art. Below is the statement by Mr. Forrest describing the work.

The Georgia College & State University (GCSU) Art Department, in collaboration with Kristen Applebee, the Art Teacher at the Georgia Academy for the Blind (GAB), is proud to present an exhibition showcasing the creative works of by over 10 students from GAB. This exhibition features cyanotypes and soft sculptures that uniquely integrate Braille script machines to add texture and depth, allowing the artwork to be experienced through both sight and touch. The cyanotypes, created using traditional photographic processes, capture the delicate interplay of light and shadow, while the soft sculptures are enhanced by the tactile patterns produced by Braille. This collaboration reflects a commitment to accessibility and the belief that art should be a multisensory experience, opening new avenues of creativity for all artists and viewers.

-Matt Forrest

It's nice to start the new year with a resumé line for last year's art students (most of which I still teach 

Middle Ground Value Drawing

Now that my Art students had a taste of how to draw geometric forms, they were ready to apply those principles to every day still life objects. We took a tour around the art room and asked "What geometric forms make up this pencil sharpener? How about this rolling pin? Water sprayer? 10 pound weight?" The world seems like a pretty simple place when you can break it down into cylinders, cubes, spheres, and rectilinear prisms. 

Students picked 3 objects to draw starting with measuring out the proportions and then breaking it down into tweaked geometric forms. I'd have to remind them to draw elipses with smooth repetitive gestures, rather than rough, bumpy lines and trying to get it right in one go.

This would be another value drawing by the time we were finished, but rather than start with white paper and build light grays into darker grays, we started with a middle gray sheet of paper and pushed values in either direction using chalk or oil pastels. It's another way to work in value, and it can yield really nice results.

Again, low students worked with their objects close enough to handle and see. Students who were completely blind used Wiki Stix to draw and sometimes trace their objects. Ones student was confused why he would lay down a bottle of paint to trace on his paper, when it was standing up. He wanted to just trace the circular bottom of the bottle. Even after showing how the drawing would eventually be viewed vertically, and having him try to trace the standing bottle with the paper being held vertically behind it, it was still a foreign concept.

The ultimate goal would be to get rid of the lines all together by pulling value from the line with lines behind darks and darks behind lights to create the "push and pull" that you. need to create the illusion of three dimensions, but that was too much to ask for every student depending on their level of vision. I think most students were happy to have the tools they needed to break down objects and values into smaller steps and create something they were proud to share. 

We Value Value Drawing: Geometric Form Value Drawing

Once my art students had filled page after practicing geometric forms, they created a traditional still life drawing using plastic geometric forms. They were required to create the illusion of space using the following techniques:

• Intuitive perspective (parallel lines going back in space with the back lines being the same length or shorter than the ones in front)
• Overlapping (part of a form can't be seen because there is another in front is covering it up), 
• Vertical placement (the form closest to the front is closest to the bottom of the paper) the highter an object is on a page, the further back it appears in space.
• Shading the objects with 3 to 5 values on the gray scale, to create distinct planes and model round forms.

Students with low vision can't be an an art class where the still life is half way across the room, but they can sometimes see the one that is just a few inches in front of them.

Students who are completely blind, used Wiki Stix to trace the objects or measure the proportions and use the principles we learned during our 3D forms practice drawings. I traced their Wiki Stix drawings in hot glue to make them permanent. Value was created using charcoal or pastels. Some students opted for oil pastels because it was less messy, but we only had one gray oil pastel in each box, so that had to be mixed on the drawing with a white or a black to create a second gray.

The light source had to be consistent, meaning every object was dark on the same side and the cast shadow was going in the same direction as the dark side. Highlights were made by leaving paper white or using the eraser to go back in and brighten it up. The edge of a piece of paper was used to use as a stencil and smudge against which created sharp edges.

These basic drawing skills will be used in upcoming projects, and I hope that students will be able to build on them the rest of their lives.

What and How of Drawing: Introduction to Subject matter and Drawing basics

Two and a half weeks into the school year and my Art students have finished making portfolios, posters, and pages of drawings geometric forms to get us started on our DRAWING unit.

Monday was spent discussing what we make art about; that's the theme. And what we make art of; that's the subject matter.

I treated subject matter in Art the way you can treat the subject of a sentence: the thing you are looking at or talking about. A subject is a noun: a person, place, or thing (or idea). It answers the questions "Who?" "What?" and "Where?" In Art, the who? is answered with a PORTRAIT of a person. The what? is answered with a thing or group of things in a STILL LIFE, and the where? is answered with a LANDSCAPE (cityscape, seascape, or cloudscape). Again, the theme is the idea behind the subject. Joseph Albers painted Squares as his subject, but his art was really about how color shifts depending on it's relationship to others.

Then we discussed the difference.between 2D shapes and 3D forms. Because my students are legally blind, I had them handle plastic models of spheres, hemispheres, cubes, cones, cylinders, rectangular prisms, hexoginal prisms, octagonal prisms, pyramids, dodecahedrons and more. After a couple days of reviewing the names, students could identify each form by name. I also had them feel rubber stamp versions of the forms and a chart of form drawings made tactile through puffy paint. There's a huge difference between a real thing and a 2D version of it.

These geometric forms are the building blocks for almost any subject: portraits, landscapes, or still life objects.  I love applying other disciplines to Art class.

By the second day of class we were ready to start drawing.  Creating a page of 20-25 circles and a page of elipses is far more useful than you'd expect. Students are used to drawing from their wrist, not from their shoulder, but by moving your whole arm loosely and smoothly, repeating the shape you get better line quality and shape. And elipse should be symmetrical weather it's cut in half horizontally or vertically.

Cylinder: Once the eclipse is mastered, I had students drawn two elipses on top of each other and parallel lines connecting them to make a cylinder. This can also be done by starting with a rectangle, and then drawing the elipses centered on the short ends like lines of symmetry.

Cone:  An horizontal elipse with a line cutting it half drawing a vertical line and that centerline can extend up has tall as you want to make your cone. Then draw lines from the top of the line down to the right and left edges of the elipse. 

Hemisphere: By now drawing elispes should be getting easier. A horizontal elpise, with circle/ half a circle arching the elipse is all you need to make a snow globe. if the half a circle goes underneiht the elipse like a smile instead of a frown, you got a bowl. 

After twenty minutes of elipses turned forms I had a student turning hemispheres into bowls of soup and cauldrons with handles and tripods. She said, "Now I can draw ANYTHING!"

Day 2 of drawing was nothing but cubes, rectilinear prisms, triangular prisms and pyramids. Drawing from the shoulder is especially important with straight lines, since working from the wrist will make the lines curved. 

I taught cube by starting with a square with parallel three lines going up from corners, away from the square, at the same angle, and then drawing a horizontal line to connect the top two line segments and a vertical line to finish off the 3rd side of the cube. You end up with three vertical, three horizontal, and three diagonal sets of lines. 

A pyramid is made by making a wide angle facing up like an alligator mouth that is open and waiting for something to fall into it. A tall pointy top closes off what looks like an upsidedown diamond shape. Then draw a line from the top point of the diamond to the bottom and you've got a pyramid.

I wish I had learned how to draw these forms and use them to make more complicated in middle school, high school, or even my college art classes.