14 year old heartbreak.

made by a 14 year old boy three days before valentine's day. no assignment.

Steve Mumford...journal drawings.

In preparation for a project about heroes with my Intermediate Drawing and Painting students I came across this great link to Steve Mumford's journal, both written and visual, from Baghdad. I had never heard of Steve Mumford before reading Inside the Painter's Studio, by Joe Fig (another great classroom resource, by the way, which I plan to have my seniors read this spring)...and I probably wouldn't have given him much thought in relation to my own work. But, whenever I do this heroes project the subject of war and the military always comes up and I rarely have artists to show and talk about in relation to the subject. I remembered his name and started researching and came across these wonderful journal drawings. His story, being an artist embedded with the troops in Iraq, captured the attention of my students...for them it felt current, relevant, exciting, and real. We had some good conversations about his daily drawings and his more finished paintings and the relationship of his work to photography. It was great for them to see a new way (but really an old way I suppose) that art can "work".

Click HERE to see the project sheet I gave them. Click HERE to see the slide show we looked at and talked about.

If you have any great art about war to share please leave a comment.

Sketchbook love.

Understanding color...in short.

A cheat sheet for painting.

Graphic description of curriculum design.

Found this while snooping around online the other day. It's a visual explanation of the bauhaus curriculum. I love the idea of having a visual like this that explains a student's experience over the course of several years and feel inspired to try to create something similar for my classes. More soon.

Rubber stamp.

Carved rubber stamp on wood for Mixed Media demo.

Tea bag painting

Tea bags emptied, filled with colored tissue paper, sewn together, attached to board with wax...from my Mixed Media class.

Sketchbook love.

Colored duct tape...I swear this student has never seen my paintings and there was no assignment given...I swear.

This blog.

It has been almost a year since I've posted to this blog.
And before that there were some long breaks too.
A couple of things happened...my ideas about how to use this blog shifted, my school placed a much bigger emphasis on technology (read I'm on the computer all...the...time), things started cooking in my own artistic life, and I got a personal life. Imagine that. It's not all teaching all the time anymore.

But now...I am feeling the need to share the things that are going on in my classroom again...to create a place to put all this stuff. I'm not sure how this blog will change or grow, but I know it has some role in my teaching practice. I plan to share lots of pictures, try some more focused writing, simplify the labels, and make it less like a daily record of what we do...more big picture. Stay tuned.