more dot art

for the birds...James John Audubon

It has been two years since I last did this lesson and we are doing it again right now which has made me pull up the older photos. This lesson is inspired by James John Audubon...who if you are unaware had a kind of crazy childhood/young adult hood...but I digress. Being the last assignment of the school years 7th and 8th graders are allowed to choose any media I have available to create their artwork inspired by a REAL bird. Here are a few from the past. Enjoy

The darn rotated photos! now I am remembering some of the reasons I stopped blogging and that was a big one. No time to try to fix it sorry folks

one year later

Wow it really has been a year since I posted. Funny how pintrest changed the world of art teacher blogging.  Our district ended up not striking when a deal was made just days before we were scheduled to walk.  One year later it all feels like a bad dream and I am happy it is in the past. Since I haven't been blogging I have gotten bad about taking photos but here are a few from a student choice unit inspired by the art Gwenn Seemel.

Chuck Close inspired

Chuck Close inspired grid drawings or paintings done by last years 7th and 8th graders. This years group is starting them this week and I came across these photos from last year and realized I never shared. Sadly most of the kids took their artwork home before I could photograph it. Voted favorite project of the year by the 8th graders.

complex color wheels and guitars

These were done by 7th and 8th grade everyday students. They worked very hard on them for several weeks.  They are quite large. The guitars are life size and the color wheels are 14" diameter. I saw the color wheel guitar idea here at the dieviantArt and tweaked it for our assignment needs.

Students had to either design a color wheel wedge slice with four sections and then trace twelve times or they had to draw their guitar body neck and head and divided into twelve sections then divided into four sections.

In each section students had to mix the parent color, a tint, a shade and show the complementary color of the parent color.

I allowed the kids to use: Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Black and Magenta tempera paint.

To top it off each student had to paint a gray scale for either the neck of the guitar or that corresponded with the content of their color wheel design.

more to come in the next few days