Pure contour drawing

Some of the most painful, challenging time in art class for teens is pure contour drawing. So many have trouble focusing on one thing alone for a full five minutes. Here is what it looks like.

Drawing upside down

Back by successful past, Drawing on the Right side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Here at som examples of student work. Much better than the self portraits!

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Beginning exercises are to draw a self portrait from a mirror, then later, to draw a person from memory. See how similar they are? That is because the students were not truly drawing from observation. We will improve this!

Locker art

Test!  Our assistant principal made me take it down after an hour. Didn't want the students to think it was okay to mess up the fronts of their lockers.
Reminds me of the rogue knitters that attach weavings to signposts and such...

Zen tangle initials

Students research zen tangle designs at tanglepatterns.com. They draw their favorites and I made them a master copy of everyone's choices from the class. Next day they fill in the area around their lowercase initials to use As a cool tag for their sketchbooks.

Tiger mountian

"Mr. Mintert, we have a tiger that we want you to make look like it is in front of a mountian. Can you do that?". What do you think?
This thing is huge. It's like 15 ft tall, 7 foot wide. I think it turned out okay.

Pre-test: self- portraits

Wanna know how good your art students draw before you teach them to draw? Do a pretest!

This is a Sketchbook Cover Page for Our JH for the year.  Saw someone else do this on Pinterest. 

Zentangle Letters Lesson

Starters, here are the resources.
tangle patterns- Zentangle resource with tutorials
Original idea, at enthusiasticartist blog

So in preparing students sketchbooks, I wanted a way to add a tag that tells us who owns the book.  So I found this image on Pinterest, by Margret Bremner.

Margret Bremmer

Margret Bremner

Characteristics:  White out letter, ( I used Cooper Black as our font)
                         Background filled in with various Zentangles.
                         Leave a border

Students will tstart by going to the computer lab to research zentangle patterns, and fill some space in their sketchbook with zentangles they like.

Then they trace their initials, and fill in a rectangle around it with zentangles, using black pens or fine tip markers.  Glue as a super cool label for their sketchbook!

New way to make sketchbooks

Ever make a 500 page sketchbook? I made one in 5 minutes today! (actually, I made like, 6). Easy! I took a ream of paper, partially opened it, clamped down near the end using some chunks of 2 x4 and some clamps. Then I covered the end with hot glue, and used a Popsicle stick to smear , and smooth it out. Making sure I had full coverage to the ends, I unclamped the paper and voila! Students will get their smaller, 30 page sketchbook paper pad by ripping out their chunk and passing the remainder to a neighbor. Super sweet! By the way, did this while waiting for our open house... Look how many people we had outside waiting!

Also, the sketchbook covers have never been better. This year: wallpaper. It's vinyl, cloth and prepasted. All you do is add water, lay down the covers, wrap around, glue down some end sheets and dry. Hot glue the 30 page pad after its dry! Super!

District meeting

Some of our Fine Arts members at our district meeting in my room.  Ms. Lawson, Ms. Barley, and my student teacher, Ms. Anger (pronounced an-jay).  We talked about Blogger, Pinterest, and using E-books in art class!  So fun!

Painting an accent wall

Getting this room lookin great for the kids.