Expeditionary Learning Conference Display

My principal--who is attending the Expeditionary Learning National Conference in Baltimore--sent me this photo today.  It highlights some of my students' work from an assignment in Art Foundations (see my blog post on February 4th).  The display describes the project and shows copies of earlier drawings that demonstrate the progression and "revision" required to complete the final 18x24 inch artwork.  I was impressed with the quality of the art that resulted from this process.  While there was only room for three images to be displayed, they could have easily selected twenty.  Kudos to the students for the hard work!

Master Studies

In my Drawing 1 class, I recently had my students study drawings by master artists.  Each student selected a copy of a master drawing and then did his/her best to reproduce it with charcoal on 18x24 inch paper.  My hope was that my students would gain greater insight into the drawing process as they observed the "solutions" used by master artists.  Overall, I was very pleased with the results.  Here a few of the drawings that resulted from the project.

 

A.M., 9th grade, Study of John Singer Sargent

A.W., 10th grade, Study of George Seurat

 C.C., 10th grade, Study of Leonardo Da Vinci

R.S., 10th grade, Study of John Singer Sargent

 B.F., 9th grade, Study of Edgar Degas

Students Exhibiting Work at EL National Conference

There are many very talented young artists at VHS, so I was very happy last week when we received an invitation to exhibit artwork at the upcoming Expeditionary Learning National Conference in Baltimore.  From what I understand, this is a pretty good thing for a new high school in its first year.  Specifically, they asked for art from an assignment done in my Art Foundations class in which my students created 18x24 self-portraits.  In this project, students focused on drawing "value shapes", or areas of similar brightness, using only line, and then colored in these shapes with arbitrary colors.  Here are a couple examples.

A Moment to Draw

With a full schedule at school and home, it's often hard to find time to draw as much as I would like.  That's one reason I look forward to VHS's Art Club.  Once per week, several of my students come into the classroom after school to work on their projects, and sometimes I can find a few minutes to draw with them.  Last week, we asked one student to sit for a life drawing.  I was able to grab some charcoal and create this sketch.