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.

Understanding color...in short.

A cheat sheet for painting.

what is it about drawings by teenage boys? they are always my favorites in the classroom. of course i try not to let it show...but the details, the imagination, i just love it. i'm always trying to figure out where they come from and why they are so consistently different from drawings by teenage girls which are fussy and self-conscious. i made those fussy drawings when i was a teenage girl and can still feel them haunting me. 3rd from the right on the top row, shaggy, might be my favorite...ever. click on it.

carianne's spill project.

carianne worked with my advanced 2d art students today. she talked about "spilling" paint and working from and with accidents. they loved this...naturally.

after "spilling" they looked for imagery within the spills and further developed the "spill" into a painting. the picture on the right became a design full of hearts.

carianne's fruit project.

carianne taught my intermediate drawing and painting class today. she wanted to do something that shared her interest in color and observation with the kids so did a variation on an ann pibal assignment. she brought in fruits and vegetable and cut them in half in front of the students. she talked about the hundreds of colors that could be found in each and had them observe closely.

then they mixed all the colors they observed and arranged them based on proportion in a circle like you see below. the paintings were beautiful and the color combinations gave me all kinds of ideas for color schemes for my own work...or home, for that matter.

i love having the artist in residence teach my students. even though i consider myself to be pretty energetic it always reminds me of how tired i can get sometimes. they always seem to have so much enthusiasm and the kids feed off that and do just about whatever they say happily.

texture drawing.

 
my intermediate drawing & painting students are making value drawings of small areas of texture around the room enlarged to create abstract compositions. i didn't do this project last term because i was afraid it was repetitive with a few other things i like to do but it seemed to fit into this weird time between the beginning of the term and the break. 
 
and this class is so diligent and passionate they ate it right up. see picture below with tongue out in concentration.

drawing the face.

this monday i had my drawing and painting students studying facial features. they've been learning to draw the figure for the past two weeks and i thought this was the logical next step. my goal when teaching students in 9th and 10th grade is to give them the skills they need to tell visual stories about their lives and without faces a teenager just can't do that. their lives are all about faces (and bodies i guess).

i find that teenagers often draw the face as if the features were stickers, flat and with no relationship to the actual face, so i decided to have them do each feature separately in their sketchbook. we talked in depth about the structure of each element of the face so they would better understand why the eye is shaped like it is....flaps of skin wrapped around the sphere of the eyeball, or pieces of cartilage sticking out from the cheek. i don't think they really think about that stuff. they're so concerned with the way people look they don't even think about why things are the way they are on the face.

i don't have my students do traditional self-portrait in any of my classes. i know this unusual. self-portraits are usually the center of the high-school art curriculum. some students choose to do them as an answer to some of the assignments i give but i don't ever require it. i'm not convinced that teenagers are objectively capable of looking at themselves in the mirror and recording what they look like...and i don't feel terribly inclined to push them to do so. isn't it more important to give them the skills of observation and drawing that will enable them to do so when they're emotionally ready? i prefer to spend class time challenging the way they see themselves as individuals in the world by asking them to create symbolic self-portraits or family portraits.

this is what silence looks like.

my 10th graders are so into their imaginary place pictures you could have heard a pin drop today. they are driven...thank god.

learning to develop ideas

 
my 10th graders at work on their imaginary place projects. it's the first imaginative project we do and i have them use "source materials" to develop their ideas so they're not exactly working from pictures and they're not exactly working from their imaginations. 

i find that although i want my students to develop their own concepts and work from their imaginations the work when they do so is often mediocre looking. mediocre looking work discourages kids in my experience. using pictures as a reference only, not to copy, seems to help them achieve the look they want. 
 

figure drawing.

today i had my 10th graders draw each other. this is always hilarious because they get embarrassed and/or love to show off. it went pretty well with this group.

as a group, they have a very hard time seeing the big picture when they draw. they have a tendency to focus on the little things and then when they step back to evaluate their work they realize the proportions or color is off.

so i started them out by telling them they could only use 3 lines to capture the spirit of the pose. then i asked them to draw a shape for a box we could put the model in. finally, we did some loose gesture drawings and i'm pretty sure the preliminary exercises helped. next week we'll focus on proportions.

seeing not the objects.

as a drawing exercise for my 10th graders i set up all these objects and...

had them observe closely while painting the negative space between and around the objects with ink. this was very very hard for them. it forced them to work slowly which i thought was great. they are beginning to understand how closely they must observe to be able to represent things accurately.

students reflecting on their work.

i have written before about my experiment with my intermediate drawing and painting class. they're all starting projects together but finishing them at their own speed. i'll write on the task of assessing this soon because...it's mid-term. i almost always give my students a self-evaluation to complete at this point. here are some of their responses. in the midst of a busy week ahead these responses were a welcome pat on the back.

candy for not quite kids

one of my favorite assignments of the year is the candy paintings i do with my 10th graders. we look at wayne thiebaud and will cotton and practice doing a lot of color mixing. i see the inner child come out in these not-quite-kids playing with the candies like blocks. and of course we eat the extras.
 

they love all the freedom it feels like they have picking out the candy, picking the background color, and arranging the candies how they want. they are very focused when we do this. i feel like the candies are just the right level for them. simple shapes, complicated colors. and the more advanced students have the opportunity to make set-ups that are more challenging while the more beginner students can make simpler ones. 
 

stay tuned for the finished paintings.

trying to give them what they need

my drawing students have been struggling with proportion. they have so much trouble seeing the relationships between objects. when i point out the comparisons to them they see it but they have trouble seeing the big picture. it's like they can only focus on one small part at a time. the big problem with this is that when they spend hours on their drawing and only later realize that they have to change something from back at the beginning they get frustrated to the point of giving up.

so i decided to spend another monday on this. in addition, i built a still life that i thought would allow them to put all their energies into the subject of proportion. i built something relatively flat and with objects of widely varying sizes. i intentionally put more than one of the same object but not in the same place so they could use it as a measuring tool. i overlapped things carefully using things like the tambourine as a target.

we reviewed using the pencil as a measuring tool and i told them to go ahead and write their realizations right on the paper they were drawing on. this seemed to help them. many of them started to get the idea of seeing the whole and then the parts. my hope is that they'll now be able to apply what they've learned to lager more involved projects.