art ed digested

I’ve seen time-lapse painting videos around, and had never tried my hand at it until now.  This has some exciting potential as a medium on its own, as well as a pre-painting tool, to teach layers, and have students share individual techniques with their peers. If only you could narrate, too!

visit Ortist

This is a “drop everything and check this out now” website!

smArt History was just suggested to me this evening, and I can’t believe that I hadn’t seen or heard about this amazingly rich and wonderful resource!

It has a wealth of art images, links, blog commentary, videos, podcasts and lessons. The site is navigated in an incredibly user-friendly way. Even their “about us” page is fabulous, and describes this tool in a way that I am loath to paraphrase:

In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies.

I hope that you will share this with your family, colleagues and classrooms, it is as entertaining as it is insightful and educational.

Sculpture at home may seem like a daunting idea, but many sculptural materials are not only easy to use, but inexpensive and tidy.

I love wire!

Wire is a great choice for elementary age artists, as the wire represents line, which makes a familiar link from two-dimensional drawing to three-dimensional sculpture. Students can clearly visualize how a drawing can become a wire sculpture by following the contours of their drawn lines.

There are many varieties of wire, ranging from thick aluminum to fine copper wire, and also colorful plastic coated wire more suited to younger artists, as it dulls any sharp wire ends.
Wire is also forgiving of mistakes and changing ideas, allowing for untwisting and re-twisting many times before the wire becomes too tangled to use again.

Below is a video tutorial demonstrating how to make a wire figure sculpture. You can create this and display as-is, or glue it to a base, add clay, aluminum foil or plaster to create a realistic figure with more volume. Try it at home with your family!

Download

Hello, edublog community!  It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this is mainly due to having a busy school year without my fabulous co-teacher Kristin.  On the upside, I am running the show, and finding tons of pleasure in crafting a curriculum that I’ve been wanting to implement for years.

One fabulous part of this school year is the opportunity to reach the community with classroom blogs through my school’s website. I can finally share all the work we’re doing in art class with parents, hurrah!  So, without further ado, here’s my first post for parent viewing:

Welcome to a new and exciting way to communicate about the Visual Arts program at Kingsley Montessori School. This page is intended to give parents a better understanding of what goes on in the art room, show concepts behind skills and techniques, shed light on the “Big Picture,” and share artwork as well as digital media, such as audio and video, more frequently. This will also be the place to find links and resources to help continue learning together at home.

Due to the overwhelming popularity and success of our Drawing-A-Day Challenge and exhibit this past February, we will have another similar challenge during the month of October, with a corresponding celebratory exhibition to share our work in November.  Details will be posted very soon!

Western Spaghetti

This animation is just so clever. I’ve just received an awesome gift that should make creating projects like this a snap- a flip mino camera. I’ll post some samples of the video soon- so far I’m finding that it’s a great little tool that my students will love using.

I was lucky enough to attend a day of the November Learning Conference yesterday, which was an inspiring experience.  After hearing some of the fabulous ideas at BLC08 today, I’m impatient to start planning for this coming school year.  Unsurprisingly, one presentation that made me wiggle in my seat thinking about new possibilities was Joyce Valenza’s allegory of Pandora- where she challenged her audience to open their boxes, to ensure that all of these new tools are available to learners, that we invite our students into the teaching process, and do it all while practicing ethical use of information and media.  It’s funny, I must have had what was similar to parental pride while watching my mom present, observing the excitement and admiration of the crowd. She was fabulous.

One issue I’m expecting to encounter is the wait, however.  It seems that sharing our work is a “no no” in my school right now, while we decide as a school community what our policies are for online media.  I find myself trying to think of ways to get around parental and administrative concerns through things like audio podcasting, which was beautifully illustrated in Bob Sprankle’s Room 208 Podcasts. How do you skip around the safety and anonymity concerns in your school while still sharing and collaborating with these wonderful new tools and strategies?

Ukuleles are not, in fact, magic as I had previously devised. They require practice, which is the sticky widget for me, as I’ve never been one to practice any new hobby for an extended period of time (eg: piano, knitting, archery, yoga, bento…)

I’m trying to stick to this one, because I actually enjoy practicing. Hopefully my roommates and neighbors can say the same for my practice sessions- thankfully the ukulele is a fairly quiet instrument.

Here’s the latest installment:

A music teacher and friend, Anne Sheridan, created this unit as part of her master’s thesis, and I love the intersections of dance, music, art and history. While her unit is geared towards middle school or high school aged students, the themes transfer easily to any age level.

This is a great example of how teachers can use voicethread to make a beautiful presentation, collaborate with colleagues, and organize lessons.

Our fourth grade students have been hard at work on their Artist-Inspired Masks, and are nearing the final stage of adding mixed media to the painted surfaces.

I am ecstatic with the range of ideas being expressed, and the thought process students are using! There will be exciting surprises once students bring in their additional materials from home to add texture and meaning.

Check out all of the masks here!

I’ve also set up a new ArtEdDigested wiki to collaborate on lesson planning with my colleagues here at Kingsley Montessori School, and hopefully my new educator friends that I am meeting here on Edublogs and in the Twitterverse. Ah, technology, I love you.

As a long-time enthusiast of sock puppets, I realize that I have never done a sock puppet lesson with my students. I think that perhaps the world at large does not understand what sock puppets are truly capable of… pretty much anything.

One of my favorite shows of all time is Sifl and Olly, a short-lived sock puppet show on MTV made by Liam Lynch. Sifl and Olly, though socks, have distinct personalities, mannerisms and even singing styles. There are also a cavalcade of peripheral characters that make appearances such as Chester the intern, and Precious Roy, home shopping network host.

I’d love to make music videos using sock puppets with the music teacher at my school, who also happens to be a fan of Sifl and Olly. For those uninitiated into the world of sock puppet, here are a couple example videos:

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Javan Ivey, a student at Pratt Institute, created this video using the “Stratastencil” technique, which seems like a great, yet challenging, project to do with a high school group. Unfortunately, difficult is an understatement for elementary students; a ton of X-Acto knife blades in the hands of reckless 12 year-olds, strict attention to detail, and the patience to continue without instant gratification. Who am I kidding? These are problems that I’d have doing this, too.

Ivey explains the process in great detail on his website, amongst many other projects to get inspiration from. (BTW-The audio track on that particular video is not kid-safe due to language)

There is no end to my longing for a computer lab in my school. Oh, the magnificent things we could create! I should research the grants available for this…

PITT Artist Pens are my new little pet. I love the ease of shading with these gray-toned brush markers, with two nice fine tipped black felt pens in the mix. I’ve been carrying these around in my purse for the last month or so and have used them fairly exclusively for the One-Drawing-A-Day challenge. The changes in gray tones from marker to marker are subtle, so it’s easy to get a smooth gradation using only a few strokes. They’re like watercolors without the mess.

Because I enjoy them so much, I will conveniently disregard that they are marketed towards Manga artists… which is too tricky a subject to get into here… fellow art teachers may already guess my views on that kettle of fish.

Their description on DickBlick:

Manga Marker Set of 8 — Faber-Castell Manga markers are recommended by leading Manga artists for their performance and range of colors. Waterproof, smudgeproof, lightfast, archival-quality ink contains a high proportion of pigment. Set of 8 includes five markers in five shades of gray with brush tip, one black brush tip, one black medium brush tip, and one black superfine brush tip in a durable plastic wallet. A leaflet provides helpful hints and advice on getting started.

I need to get a set of these in a multi-color pack, perhaps their sepia set as well. I’m a confirmed addict. For me, markers are fun again. Whoopee!

This video has some great ideas for using non-art materials to create something unexpected and wonderful.

Yesterday, I experimented with two upper elementary students to make drawing tools out of things we found laying around. Some of the most useful tools were:

• feathers, their plumes uses as brushes/stamps, their quills used as pens
• beads glued to string and dragged across paper
• hot chocolate as ink
• long dowels attached to just about anything
• burlap dipped in ink
• paper rolled in tubes and used as brushes
• our feet!

I’m still going strong on my drawing-a-day challenge, and will post some new images soon to prove it! My students and colleagues are doing a great job keeping up on their own challenges too, I feel quite proud.

What art teachers really make:

• we make students learn to love their “mistakes” and look at erasers as violent weapons
• we make students look into a mirror and see possibilities instead of flaws
• we make students see beauty in a pile of trash
• we make students realize that creating Art takes thought, planning and practice
• we make students see through the eyes of our world’s history of artists
• we make students pour their guts out onto a page or into a lump of clay
• we make students create more than they thought possible
• we make faculty and staff see their students in a new way
• we make parents proud and jealous, because they “were never good in art” like their children
• we make reality-tv-free culture a hopeful possibility for the next few generations
• we make people believe that they can change the world with  a pencil, a pixel, a camera or a block of stone

What do you really make?

I’ve been playing around with this simple, yet amazingly rich tool, voice thread. It’s like PowerPoint, but web-based, incredibly user friendly…. and awesome. Imagine sharing actual spoken comments about a book with a class across the world, or having an art critique using doodled lines to define exactly which part of the art piece you are discussing!
Currently, it is FREE for teachers to obtain a pro account, so grab one and start experimenting! I have also heard through the grapevine that voice thread is considering opening a site just for educators soon.

I whipped this example voice thread up in about 20 minutes to play with a few photos from a recent trip.

The possibilities seem endless for this tool.

Edit- I just received this message from VoiceThread: