NAEA12

This week I'll be traveling back to my hometown, NYC to attend the National Arts Educators Association's 2012 National Conference. This is an exciting opportunity to share and learn from some of the greatest art educators around the country.

Not only will I be attending the conference but I'm also a presenter. Robb Sandagata, Digital Curriculum and Interactive Media guy for Davis Publications and I will be presenting Transforming Curriculums with Engaging Ideas and Research-based concepts on Friday, March 2 at 11am.

There are three parts to this presentation...



#1. Looking at Things Differently:
Robb and I will share our experience teaching the standard art lessons in slightly non standard ways. i.e. last time you taught perspective did one of your students try to step on the others?



#2. Using Traditional Materials Non Traditionally:
Most students use masking tape to hold two pieces of paper together. We use it to create murals. We'll give a few example of taking that very common classroom material and using it in a whole new way.



# 3. Traditional Concepts Using Non Traditional Materials:
We've all taught value by shading with a pencil. Not many of us have tried using mud. We'll explore teaching some very traditional concepts with some very non traditional materials including, mud, bricks and birdseed.

See you in NY!

Skittle Art Almost Done

50 pounds latter and we are almost done with our Skittle art portraits. This is a good thing because...

A. I fear for my life if parents need to buy one more bag
B. My budget is dwindling as I try to subsides Skittles
C. My tummy hurts and I think I have a cavity

Skittle Art : Part 2

We're getting there!

Wow, this project is taking longer than I thought. I also under estimated the amount of Skittles it was going to take to complete a portrait!

However, the students are starting to see their faces in the Skittles so they are a little more excited and a little less ready to kill me.. . see previous skittles post.

Now that is Painting!

This project encouraged students to incorporate paint splats into an image. It was wide open. The only requirements were:

1. Incorporate paint spats

2. Limit the color palette in some way by either reducing the amount of colors or choosing a color theme i.e. monochromatic, analogous, complimentary..




Oh, and 3. They had to use paint spalt photos that we took... like this one.

How to Make Sure Your Art History Class Hates You

AKA Make an Art History remake of the Kina Grannis song - In Your Arms



Why will they hate me?

We filmed our Kina look-a-like today with the purpose of creating an animatic. The animatic will be used to show the placement of our Kina's mouth (so her mouth will match up with the words of the song) when we film the photos needed for the stop motion video...

and how many photos will that be??



4,500 photos

Don't tell them. They still think this is going to be a fun project.

How to Make Sure Your Art 1 Class Hates You

AKA Skittle Art



We started by taking expressive photos of ourselves... Then, we manipulated the photos in PhotoShop to match Skittle colors.



A little tedious trying to figure out how many Skittle we would need and how large the cardboard should be cut .



But once the hard part is over... well..



All that is left to do is glue down the 2000 or so Skittles...

Shadow Drawing

Today in Art One we set up piles of junk to create shadow drawings...



Using a ruler for the water line and a water bottle to create the blue of the sea, these students create an ocean scene.





This group used cut out paper to create their African safari.





Hanging junk form strings helped this group create outer space.





Using junk out the box, this group create a fire rescue scene.

PhotoShop Space

After watching a short tutorial on gradients, I challenged the class to create a space painting. The results were so fantastic that I will definitely expand on this in the future!