Student Art Show: People, Places and Things!

The student art exhibition had to do with subject matter. Students made a lot of Portraits in the style of famous artists like Kehende Whiley and Chuck Close.

Students recreated famous portraits by the masters of Renaissance, Surrealism, and Pop Art.

They created still life drawings using graphite, pastel. And they displayed their 3D model of the campus for the giant wooden map of Macon downtown.

Below is a picture of one blind student showing her blind friend her drawing. The lines of the bottles are raised in hot glue. She found her piece using the Braille tag beside the work.

 The Christmas Art Sale was a huge success as well. I love seeing my students pointing out which pieces they made to faculty and peers. They're almost giddy when they say, "I made this one!"

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.

Value Drawing of Geometric Forms

Observational Drawing is probably the greatest challenge for students with visual impairments. If they can't really see what they are supposed to draw, how are they supposed to draw it? And it is especially tricky when the visual illusion of a 3D form is so different from the form itself. Take a cube, which is made up of six squares each with four right angles, but is drawn using three diamonds-no right angles. A cylinder is made with a circle on each end, but the illusion of cylinder requires the only circle included, to be replaced with an eclipse. 

For those who are completely blind, it became more of a lesson in following directions and learning about how sighted people see the three dimensional world with illusions rather than necessarily truth. They could measure size relations between objects with their hands and then try to replicate that with wikisticks.  Then it was a matter of explaining light sources and have them draw with charcoal on one side and smudging on the other.

My students may not become wealthy artists years from now, but they will be able to tell you the difference between a shape and a form (even many adults make the mistake of saying "3D shapes"), that the medium of charcoal is essentially burnt wood, and explain what value is and why it is important. Mission accomplished.