Snowmen Castrophe

My challenge, teach a cartooning lesson that does not use people or animals.
 .I went through my comic book collection I have mostly people,superheroes and personified animals in there.I looked through my old examples of comic strips that I had made--all about my dog.."No,those are not  not going to work" I said.

I spent some time on several web pages  looking up cartoon tutorials. I found one on drawing a cartoon snowman..No tutorial really needed just three circles but I did like the cartoon eyes. This would work and gave me tons of great ideas.Snowmen could have facial expressions.They could have conversations and if personified they would also have problems,conflicts and issues just like other cartoon characters.

I tried this first  with the morning program kids. The students were  kindergarten, fourth and fifth grades.

They  had some great ideas of what could happen that would be bad for a snowman. I thouhght of limbs falling off mine other thins kids thought of were "They could melt". "A dog could pee on them","Someone could throw hot water on them."

I tried this again later the same day with another group of students. I showed them my examples and walked them through a few morecompostional  drawing tips then the morning crew had. This was the class I had prepred it for.The morning group I was using it as a timefiller . I talked to them about snowmen not being perfectly round and that they could be other shapes,I mentioned that they could be female instead of male. I got questions about this..  I clarified with "Keep it appropriate. I do not need to see snow people genitals. The clothing is descriptive enough."



 I was working along with another artist teacher this class and she is partial to using washable markers and brushing into them with water for a watercolor effect.  I worked very successfully for this project. It allowed you to get the bold markers colors were you wanted bold but to also get nice color washes in areas for snow or sky were you want some transparency.The students had great success with them and created snow people that wore tie dye, had huge hats being attacked by cats, triangular snow people, cubed snow people etc.

I really enjoyed these and honestly want to do a whole series with the three cartoon snow persons I created.

Food Pop Art

                                             
Okay, so must of us have seen the brightly colored silkscreen  faces by artist Andy Warhol. Many, many art teachers have had students do a variation on Andy's work by drawing their own faces multiple times and changing the colors...
Food is the inspiration for a lot of my art. so we did Pop Art Food.
Here is the images of my steps poster.

One of the students wanted a cat instead of food I told her fine so could do that. She said so really did not have a favorite food.

The hardest part of the assignment for the kids seemed to be that they had to reference the color wheel for the complimentary color combination. It was also a challenge to change the color of an object from what it should be. For example making an orange not orange.

In the past I had done the assignment with middle school students using their favorite cartoon character instead of food. We used tempera paint instead of markers of colored pencil. I preferred the pencils/ markers  to the paint. This worked best for quick dry time,easy storage and overall convenience.

Private tutor tie -Dyes

So amongst my many art teaching jobs I continue to love to work with private tutor students. I have been meeting with one student for private tutor lessons for over a year now. I work with a very energetic and funny sixth grader. We were working on Boy Scout requirements and he had to put a logo he designed himself onto some personalized items. So, I thought "Lets make some t-shirts.We can put your logo on that". I gave him an option of tie dye, paint with acrylics and to use a stencil and spray dye.

He wanted tie- dye so that is what we did. I always tie dye outside. It damages the grass a lot less then carpets in side. You can put the shirt right on the lawn. I have done this with ninth graders. They loved it. In the past I have used rubbers band and Rit dye then dipped the shirt into the dye. This time we used Tulip dye in bottles and dumped the dye onto our twisted shirts.

So I went through Sept, with few sub calls. I was worked on grant applications and looking into sole propreteiorship of my arts business. I have also looked into teaching artist opportunties. S o I was working on those and also applying for work at grocery stores, craft stores etc. All this while also completing my parttime teaching and coordinating work at the Museum.I was then called to fill in for a long term middle school sub assignment. I had alot of fun with this kids .I got to try some new projects and combine some new ideas as well.

The sixth class completed several projects such as: T- shirt designs, creating recyled paper,line deisgns, they also worked on the Mona drawing assignment and made leaf collages.

I orgianlly came up with the leaf collage assignment while teaching in Arkansas. I made take my dog to walk in the park and was anmored with the colors, shapes and textures of the leafs.

I collect the leaf while I press them between my books. Students then create four varitions of the leaf. They make a drawing og the leaf with oil pastels, then make a second samll drawing with colored pencil of the same leaf. when the drawings are completed they brush paint onto the back veins of the leaf and create a leaf print on white paper.The students then take all four variations of their leaf and the actual leaf and collage them onto paper.


I have doen this assignment with sixth and seventh grade and found that most students had sucess with it.

7th grade students completed half magazine images. Students had a chance to choose an image form the internet that they had printed as well. They cut the image in half and glue one hlaf to paper then draw the other half.

Drawing by 7th grade student Rachael.

Drawing by Haley



Eigth grade students like to show off for one another so I figured "Why don't we use this to our advantage?" The students modeled for each other and created a series of simple gestural drawings based on the others students poses.
They then look at their drawings and choose eight poses that they liked. They postioned those three figures toghether and drew tehm again vertically on watercolor paper in permenent marker. After drawing the three figures they paininted the background with watercolors using water color techniques:salt, scratching, layering and resist.