Lesson Plans and Progress

August is almost gone.  That means a few more days of doing as I please, and enjoying quiet days with my two dogs who rest up all day in anticipation of when my husband walks through the door after work. Then they come alive!  He just can't understand why they are so quiet all day long with me.  I have trained them well!

My quiet "dog days" will soon become filled with the chatter of energetic teenage girls ready to collect and store whatever nuggets of artistic wisdom I can pass along to them.  So in preparation for  that first day of school, I have begun planning my curriculum.   I have added and subtracted projects with courses I have already taught, and created the curriculum for 2 new courses.

I've been teaching art for many years.  With the introduction of technology, things have definitely gotten easier for teachers, especially in the area of finding ideas for lesson plans.  When I began teaching, I had to think about what projects I would come up with, wonder if they would work, how they would look and if they would be fun for the students.  I would visit the library, modify projects I had done in college and just experiment.   Enter technology!  Have an idea? Just type it in on your computer, and you will get a huge assortment of projects, complete with the lesson plans and student examples. You can even read comments from those who may have tried the ideas already.  But, even though I myself have relied on the internet for ideas, I still love some of my tried and true projects that I have updated over the years.

I remember when I first started teaching, I began my drawing classes off with the element of line.  I had the students go up to the blackboard, which in itself is sort of an archaic teacher's aid, and draw a word using lines that they felt best represented the word.  I would give them the words, of course, to steer them in a more creative direction.  That project led to learning block lettering and then using the block letters in a one word poster.  In recent years, I have updated that poster project to be a tribute to Peter Max, but containing their name and things that pertain to them in and amongst the pop art flowers and bright colors  Funny, but now I have reinvented my love of lettering in teaching graphic art and design.  Years ago, I felt it was a good thing for the students to learn lettering because they would need it when they made all those posters for their classes.  Now they convey that same poster information digitally. so the need to know how to create hand drawn letters for that purpose seems unnecessary. 


Peter Max inspired poster/portfolio cover

I will be teaching a mixed media course this year in addition to my graphic courses, and although I love teaching art via the computer, I miss the days of teaching drawing and painting.  So when I had the opportunity to teach a mixed media class this year, I was very excited.  I sat down to create my curriculum, the first thing I did was search ideas online.  Then I went to all the lesson plans I had seen and saved on Pinterest, opened a notebook and made some thumbnails and notes.  I started sequencing the projects and adjusting techniques and materials to suit my needs.

I think it is vital that I test out any projects ahead of time to discover the potential pitfalls and difficulties the students may encounter.  I have seen my roster and I have taught or have seen the previous year's work of most of the students in the class, so I know what they are capable of.

When I thought about all the projects that I had selected for this class, I realized that there really wasn't a lot of me in the course, just some projects that used my favorite materials and techniques that I had found on the internet.

So early one morning, as I lay awake at 3 AM, I started thinking about some of the projects I had done using various materials in courses that I have dropped from the curriculum or absorbed into other courses.  I taught a decorative arts class, a design class, and an art history class at one time or another and had some successful projects in some of those courses that I can resurrect and use.  I felt comfortable knowing the success and skill factor of some of those projects, and I thought that they would lend the "me factor" that I had been searching for to the course.



Student example of an altered book with a children's book theme from a past drawing class

 I will insert an altered book project.  I had done this project with my drawing classes several years ago, and although it was time consuming and a little messy, the students enjoyed doing it.  I will also add a copper foil embossing project which I had the students attach to a piece of black mat board and extend the design using colored pencils.  I remembered that one after I saw something similar online.  I will also do a polymer clay project which I had done with my design class using an tin container, creating a trinket box.  With that project, I had done a picture transfer using rubbing alcohol.  I will do this again with a few adjustments.  I am a big fan of line and texture, black and white.  I find myself gravitating to this type of drawing activity, however, I know I have to shake things up a bit and do more collage and 3D work.  I am doing a combination yarn painting and fiber fusion project, batik, and printing on fabric.



Polymer clay over a tin box with a copy transferred to the clay using rubbing alcohol

I will do a stencil project, and a 3D cardboard sculpture of fantasy sunglasses (larger than actual sunglasses of course) with an image painted in the lenses.

One of  my favorite finds was a combination collage and ink drawing.  Here is a sample version I did on a notebook page.  It was so much fun to do and I know the girls will love doing it.

My "Line Lady" example on notebook paper


Teaching is all about growing, learning, and adapting.  I have done a lot of that over the years in the classroom, but I think it has kept me creative, and made me continually strive to be a better teacher.  For today, though, I will sit on the couch with  my two snoring dogs and my lesson plans and enjoy my last days of solitude.

Goodbye, Summer Crafting!

I have been doing a lot of much needed cleaning this summer.  Now that the days of summer vacation are swiftly coming to an end, I have to start thinking less about organizing closets and more about organizing lesson plans.
I still have a week or so to straighten things up.  I am now in the process of desperately trying to organize and turn my daughter's old room into a craft/storage room.  She is married and hasn't lived at home since she graduated from college, but I always find it hard to throw away remnants of her life at home.  I have to get rid of things in increments.  The more time that passes, though, the easier it is to throw things away.  She has told me to just throw it all away, but it's not that easy for me.  Everything I find is a memory.  I came across the soda can lamp she made in middle school.  I'm sure everyone has something like that squirreled away in their closet that their child made in shop class with the little brass name plate with their name and date on it.  I took a photo of it and sent it to her asking if she wanted it.  I knew she would immediately text me back telling me to please pitch it!  I snickered, waiting for her response, and, as expected, she said just that. Later when I spoke to her on the phone, she asked if I thought she would want it for her living room table. 
But, someday when she is a mom, she will cherish those crazy little memories that will bring to mind  happy childhood days.

I digress. Back to my cleaning story.  So I replaced her old things with my sewing and painting supplies.  I now have room in the closet for my craft supplies and Artfire shop inventory.
As I was organizing my craft and sewing materials, I came across things that I had forgotten I had socked away.  I discovered fabrics, craft supplies and patterns.  Sometimes I pick things up that strike my fancy at a thrift shop or rummage sale and forget about them.  It's always fun to find things that I had long forgotten about. 
I was on a doll making kick a few years ago and I found a couple of patterns I never used for some rag dolls.  I have to be in the mood to make dolls, and I felt that feeling coming on.
 

After I finished putting my craft room together as best I could (there just is never enough room, though), I sat down at my sewing machine and stitched up a doll from one of the patterns I found.  I am faced with the realization that my summer crafting days are numbered, and soon my creative days will be limited to the weekends once school starts. Looking over the amount of things I made over the summer, I am happy to say that it was a truly productive time.  One more doll for old times' sake.  Goodbye, summer!

Yarn Painting

One of my favorite projects from last year's  Fibers and Fabrics class was yarn painting fashion design.  I know that sounds like a strange combination, but let me explain.

Last year, I taught a one semester class entitled Photoshop Fashion which basically consisted of learning the different parts of garments, categories of clothing, fashion terms and designers, and designing various garments using Adobe Photoshop.  The following semester, the same girls were enrolled in a course called Fibers and Fabrics.  In this class, they created projects using mostly fabrics and yarns.  Since they had all just had a semester of dress designing on Photoshop, designing their clothing on fashion figure templates, I took it a step further and taught them how to draw their own fashion figures.  All of these girls had previously taken my graphics classes, and although most of them were pretty good using the computer, none of them had actually taken a drawing course, but they were a creative group, so I had high hopes for them.  They did not disappoint.

After drawing a simple fashion figure on a 12" x16" piece of drawing paper, they sketched out their garment design on their fashion figures and then transferred their drawings onto poster board using graphite paper ( if you don't have graphite paper, the tried and true method of covering the back of the drawing with a thick layer of pencil and then flipping it over with the scribbled side down onto the poster board and tracing over with pencil works just as well).

I showed them some examples of yarn painting which I did in my art history class several years ago.  We were going to adapt that technique and use it to create yarn fashions.

The girls were skeptical at first of this seemingly daunting task that lay ahead of them, but as they began, they realized that it was easier than it looked. 

They could use any type of yarn from my yarn box.   I stressed creating different patterns and colors with the yarn which would make the final outcome much more interesting.  The only trick to doing this project is keeping  the yarn from sticking to your fingers as you glue it down.  (I suggest a toothpick to push the yarn down instead of your fingers.)

If I did this project again, I would have the students do some sort of a minimal background using watercolor or scrapbook paper.  I was pleased with the results, though.  They were all so different depending on their choice of yarn, color, technique and design. Unfortunately, the photos are not that good, but you can get an idea of what they came up with.