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.