Art I Color Wheel drawings

             In Art I, we have just finished up our unit on color theory, which of course included the color wheel. I decided to do a small scale “creative color wheel” drawing this year, in hopes that we wouldn’t spend too much time on it, but still come out with a nice product.

I found the challenge for students to be generating ideas. They were to draw a scene or image of their choice into which they had to somewhat prominently work the color wheel. The could render the drawing in whatever media they chose — graphite, marker, colored pencil — but the color wheel itself had be to painted, as they had to mix their colors.

Students had to complete thumbnail sketches of ideas for their drawings, but still it seemed difficult for many of them to come up with ideas. What can I do to improve this next year  (if we do it again)? And what was the difficulty this year? Not sure…there are so many neat ways a color wheel could be worked into a picture.

Here are some of the color wheel drawings from the assignment that turned out very nice. . . enjoy!

 

Art Society creates banner

Once again our art club has created a tremendous banner for the Board of Education. Each year the Board asks a school to volunteer to create this banner, which is no small feat! Congrats to the SCHS Art Society for a super job on this year’s banner!!

Art students working on banner
Art students working on banner
Art Society President Jon Lee and Vice President Stephanie Simmons
Art Society President Jon Lee and Vice President Stephanie Simmons

2014 Banner

Something to share…

I had the opportunity to attend CREATE 2014 this past summer in Knoxville, Tn. It was really fabulous. I thought I’d share what I created in a workshop there. We learned the art of Sumi-e painting (Japanese ink painting.) It made me think of a cartoon my oldest used to watch on PBS, Sagwa. About the cat who painted beautifully with ink? During this conference I was grieving the loss of a dear friend, which made its way into my art.

Sumi painting

Festival of Trees 2013

And a year later. . . our Christmas trees from the 2013 Festival of Trees! Each year the Fly Arts Center showcases beautiful trees decorated by businesses and organizations around town. Our art students always do a lovely job representing us! This year the theme was “‘Tis the Season to Sparkle and Shine.” The SCHS Art club did an awesome job interpreting this theme with a beautiful, handcrafted tree. Many of the metallic ornaments look like metal, although they are all paper. We were delighted to take home a 2nd place award for “Best Handcrafted.” Hope you enjoy our trees!

Chuck Close inspired portraits

 I’ve taught a similar assignment; however, this time we put a new twist on it. Portraits were broken down into tiny squares ala Chuck Close, then value was interpreted with black and white symbols or designs. This assignment required a lot of fortitude on the student’s part, but as you can see, there are some lovely results!

Observational Pumpkin drawing

Students once again drew gourds from observation, then worked them into a creative composition. Here are some of the great results!

van Gogh – inspired Paintings

Summer is here! and I will have to strive to catch up on posting the last of this year’s artwork. Advanced Painting students, after studying van Gogh’s painting techniques, attempted their own post-impressionist masterpiece. Below are a smattering of the results. Enjoy!

P.S. The accompanying PowerPoint for this lesson, “Starry, Starry Night,” is posted on the Resources page. And if it’s not, leave a comment; I’ll get it on there when I’m not so sleepy!! 😉