Unpeeled project

Abstract geometric radial design

after looking at Piet Mondrian, students designed and completely abstract radial design.  using rulers and compasses they generated geometric shapes. They were then finished using colored pencils and markers.  Their minimum requirement was three circles, 1 square, one triangle, per quadrant.

Art club mandalas

Tibetian flute music playing.  Silence from our voices. Letting the drawing come to us.

Hot dog I love that weiner man!

I love VWs, and my principal drives a VW bug.  she also loves hot dogs so when I found this box I combined the two!  papercraft model can be found at this link. it gets me thinking I think my students will make some papercraftmodels!

It also reminds me of a song my wife remembers from her youth:

I know a weiner man 
he owns a weiner stand
he sells most anything from hot dogs on down
one day i'll join his life
i'll be his weiner wife
hot dog i love that weiner man!

Cartoon skeleton project

Tessellation portraits

this is a 2 part project starting with tessellations.  students use a square of poster board as a template. They design their own tessellation and then apply it to a background.  they are then painted in with acrylics using either a warm or a cool color scheme.  Meanwhile I take their photographs and I digitally manipulate them using photoshop.  I adjust the contrast, changing to grayscale then posterizing it for the students.  I print this off and then go back to photoshop and flip the image.  1 more print in we are ready to trace.  students put their image on a window and trace the value shapes.  the resulting image looks like a paint by number project.  using their original photographs for guidance, they paint in different values of color.  this is then cut out and glued on top of the Tessellation page.

No. 2 Pencil Project

this lesson comes from Ken Vieth's book entitled "From Ordinary to Extraordinary"  where students take a common place object, the pencil, and transform a drawing of their creation into pencils.  This visual problem project promotes creative thinking, higher-order thinking, and visual awareness.  Many found this project to be a challenge.

It starts with drawing a pencil, noting its component parts and characteristics:  Black end, cone, ridges, yellow, black lettering, metal band, eraser.  Then students generate an large image on a sheet of drawing paper.  This is most successful with these qualities:

Large, line drawing, of a person, place, thing or animal.  Should have a blank background, no color, no value, little texture.

Then the transformation begins.  All the space within their drawing is filled with pencils. They can be pushed, pulled, squeezed, stretched, to fill the space. No leftover space is allowed.  Then they are colored in with the colors of pencils, paying attention to shading to make them appear 3-D.

pencil