The World in my Classroom

If you can't take the students to Paris, bring Paris to the students. The music classes at my school are learning songs from around the world, so my little mural making class has taken the opportunity to create a backdrop for the program. We have four 8'x4' panels each with a different landmark. The pagoda for Japan and towers from Italy and France were no brainers. When it came to an edifice for various African songs, I was stumped. Lucky for me, my Art History Professor sister, Lynne, focused her dissertation on African architecture. She suggested The Great Mosque of Djenne, which is a huge, 110-year old earthen structure on the flood plain of Mali.

I projected my drawings for low vision students to trace with chalk over last year's spring sets, then we did underpainting and added the final touches. So even though we didn't explore the actual places, there's something to be said about exploring painting techniques.

Shape Month for My Art Class

I dedicated our first month back in school to the design element of SHAPE. I've never taught any of these projects before, but I wanted to find the clearest ways possible to teach the basics of art to students who are visually impaired.

Notan
This is my new favorite way to teach the concept of NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE SHAPE. Notan is a Japanese design principle in which dark and light shapes are juxtaposed in an image.  With blind students I found it very helpful to have them use  foam sheets because they could feel the indented lines they drew in creating a shape, and once it was cut out they could put it all back together like a puzzle. After they flipped and glued each piece, they could feel the negative shape (the hole) and the positive shape (the piece they flipped). They each made two images, one symmetrically and one asymmetrically balanced.

 

Rectilinear Relief Sculptures
I felt like a little kid at Christmas when all my new classroom supplies rolled in; I just wanted to play with the boxes. I cut these boxes into hundreds of cardboard rectangles which I sorted into piles according to size.  Students gathered a variety of rectangles and picked two primary colors, which they could mix to create an analogous color scheme. They learned about visual unity through color and repetition of RECTILINEAR SHAPES. They arranged the rectangles several times and took digital photos of three different compositions before they chose one for me to hot glue.

 


Sports Posters
This assignment came about because Coach asked me for help covering his ugly cupboards and I'm all about interdisciplinary assignments.
CURVILINEAR SHAPES are the opposite of the rectangles we worked with the previous week. But we were still building unity through variety of size and unity through repetition of shape. My blind students traced circles with wiki sticks. This provided the tactile boundaries so they would know where to paint. They used black acrylic for the under painting, and then acrylic or oil pastel for the color on top.The fingerprints and smudges come from trying to feel for the dry areas that still needed painting.

Half Face Drawings
I remember loving this project when I was a kid and have been wanting to try it out with students for a long time. National Geographic had a great article about race in America and I was able to read it and discuss a little genetic science with the students. This assignment was used to teach about NATURALISTIC SHAPE as well as symmetry, proportions of the face, and observational drawing skills like trying to match color. Observational Drawing is hard when you are completely blind, so I traced half the face in hot glue for those students, and after they glued that half face, onto a piece of card stock, they used wiki sticks to create the other half the face. Then they used colored pencils and pastels to color it. Students really enjoyed the process.

From the Art Classroom

I love that my blind and visually impaired art students say, "It's nice to see you."

When something is amiss they might say, "That doesn't look right," and when they understand what I'm talking about, they say, "I see."

The fact that their eyes don't work perfectly, doesn't mean they have to use a different phrases then sighted people. They live in the same world, and deserve to understand what people are talking about when they make references to art. They also deserve to try their hand at art projects. Art, after all, is for everyone.

I recently had my students empty their portfolios onto the wall for a critique. It is so fun to track 

their progress and how see much they've accomplished in the last few months.

I had each student pose in front of their work while I took their pictures. I can't share the photos of them, but I can share a few of their self portraits.

 We talk about line of symmetry and proportions. Mirror's aren't always useful, but students can use their fingers to determine how far apart their eyes are, and what fraction of their head is taken up by their forehead.

This student used wiki sticks to "see" his "drawing" as he worked.

Tessellation projects are are a favorite way to teach math/art concepts of perimeter, shape and pattern. I have a slide lecture of M.C. Escher images that I describe in detail to those who can't see, and then they used wiki sticks to trace the templates they made.

Observational concepts such as linear perspective and use of value to show three dimensions were tackled by my low vision students.   

Right before winter break, we studied Andy Warhol before doing screen prints of snow flakes. And we learned a little about Frank Lloyd Wright and architecture before building and decorating graham cracker houses.

Thinking Outside the Jack-o-lantern

It is pretty common for me, on the first day of a college art class, to ask students to take a few minutes and draw a man on a bicycle with an umbrella. I can’t remember where this idea came from. But I can remember that in about a dozen years of doing this that almost every one of my students have ended up drawing a stick figure riding a stick bicycle, facing right, and holding a vertical, open umbrella. One or two students in each class have the man facing left and once every couple years, someone will have a closed umbrella. One, count it, ONE time (about eight years ago) someone did draw with a view from the front, but that was only after the first sketch of the right facing cyclist.

I have yet to see a drawing of a circus clown standing on the bicycle seat and balancing with a tiny polka dotted umbrella or an angry young man jumping up and down on a broken heap of a bike while beating it with an umbrella. In fact, I’ve never seen anything interesting come from this challenge.

That’s the point. I want students to recognize that the first idea that pops into their head, is the first idea that pops in to pretty much everyone else’s head too.

Being original means we must dig a little deeper. Think a little harder.

Last summer, I decided to offer a mini assignment with a greater possibility for creativity. I asked my graduate students to draw “Halloween” then waited to see how many witches, goblins, black cats, skeletons, ghosts, mummies, zombies, vampires, spiders, haunted houses, cemeteries, ravens, headless horsemen, werewolves, and trick-or-treaters would be represented. The results were similar to the “man on the bike with an umbrella” assignment in the shocking lack of variety. Every student drew a jack-o-lantern. Two of them finished early and managed to add a Pac Man style ghost to the right of their jack-o-lantern.

After these experiments, most students promise that they will try harder to “think outside the box.” I tell them that they can start by not using the cliché “think outside the box.” 

Apple says to “Think Different.”  

Chanel goes a step beyond thinking by telling us to “Be unexpected.”

Sign a urinal. Paint a green stripe down your wife’s nose.  Place daisies at the tips of your mustache. Except don’t. All of those things have been done by men who lived a century ago and had a reason to do them. But do look beyond the obvious and find ways to happily surprise your readers, friends, clients, or workshop attendees.

After the Halloween exercise I went home and made my own image of Halloween. Yes, there are skeletons in my painting. Yes, one is carving a triangle-eyed jack-o-lantern but the other is breaking holiday barriers. He’s dying eggs. 

This image won 1st place at last weeks SCBWI Southern Breeze

Annual Illustration Contest last week.