Thursday, December 12, 2013

It's Edvard Munch's Birthday!

And just who is he?  Everyone probably recognizes this painting, but remembering the name of the artist is a bit more difficult.  VP students recently made their own versions of Edvard (spelled correctly!) Munch's most famous pastel painting: The Scream.  We defined parody and then looked at some of the more well-known parodies of this painting.  They especially liked the Homer Simpson one (naturally) and also the Home Alone movie poster.  Munch, born in 1863 on December 12th, was a prolific Norwegian artist who is mainly remembered for the several versions of this painting.  The 1893 version sold at auction in 2012 for 119.9 million and was the highest value recorded for an artwork sold at auction to that date.   That price was surpassed this year by a Francis Bacon painting, but the price was still way beyond what we can imagine.

Students were asked to create a parody of The Scream.  As you can see, they were very good at coming up with situations where a scream might be appropriate.  Other instructions were to come up with both a creative background and foreground, to use a variety of lines and repetition of lines, as Munch did in his paintings, and to think about color scheme. 

 
 


 
 


 
 
 

Sunday, December 1, 2013

BUSY HANDS AT WORK!

There's been more delay than I would like to see in posting since my laptop suddenly got very ill.  Happily it's back on track (thanks to techie elves) and I can get back to sharing Vulture Peak art with you. 

Students were busy happily creating ornaments for the PTA trees just before the Thanksgiving break and you might enjoy seeing some of their hands at work.  We enjoy supporting PTA which does so much for our students. 







Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Studying Value in Painting

One of the principles of design we study is "value."  In this case, it doesn't mean money, but rather refers to the lightness or darkness of a color.  This is often a difficult concept for middle school students to grasp.  To reinforce this concept, students made a value sketch in one color - blue.  We call them our "Blue Man Group" paintings.  When those were finished, students then used oil pastels to draw the painting but this time using color. They were much more successful in including the darker shades using color.

Here is a group of work with the blue paintings and the final artwork.  Great job, VP Artists!

 
 
 
 

 
 

 

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Figure Drawing in Middle School


I'm probably more excited about these drawings than my students but I thought they did such a fantastic job drawing the figure, and getting the proportions of the figure correct isn't that easy for young or new artists.  We used the wooden mannequins  to learn the proportions of the figure.  Students first spent some time sketching these figures. Then we painted and printed a background on good paper, and lastly they added figures.  Click on any photo to enlarge. 
Let us know what you think.  
 

      
 



         

            

 



Thursday, October 24, 2013

More Art Toolkits

Here are a few more of the Elements of Art Toolkits students designed.  Inside each toolkit is the definition of that particular element. 

From Period 1:
 
 
And from Period 3:
 


Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Welcome to the Art Room

Welcome.  This blog is for our students but especially for the families. I wanted a way for students to share their wonderful work with their immediate families, but also with their family members far away.  I'm just going to jump in with artwork from this year's students. Since we are starting after the first quarter there will be looking back involved.  Please bear with me as I learn how to post multiple photos at one time!  It's a strong learning curve for me.

An early assignment was to make an "elements of art" toolkit (thank you artroom104 for the lesson plan).  The elements of art are the tools artist use to make art such as color, line, shape, etc.  This is very preliminary lesson since we will also be learning about the principles of design a little later on.  This was a simple assignment but the kids did a fantastic job of turning these into lovely works.  Here's a sample of some of them.