Spring 2013 Art Show

Well I survived my first art show EVER! and WOW was that an exhausting Friday! Just to tell you how exhausting it was, I hopped on the scale as soon as I got home late Friday night and I had dropped 3 lbs from that morning. Not bad..!!! But that just tells you how much running around I did!!! WHEW!

I decided to wait and not hang up the art work during the day and hang it up after school right after the show. Which means we had a total amount of 2 hours to get everything hung up and presentable. It was absolute madness. Thankfully, I had about 15-20 students that stayed after school to help me hang up everything. We got it all done in an hour and 15 mins. BOOM. I was so happy to have them help me and I don't know what I would have done without them.

I really wished I took more pictures during the show. If you plan on doing an art show, take as many pictures as you can. Possibly, assign someone to take the pictures for you. My problem was I wanted to talk to all my parents so I ended up not snapping enough shots. But here are a few of the shots I did get.

We had it in the cafeteria after much speculation over whether it should be there or in the hallway. I am glad we had it in the cafeteria because after hanging everything up we had SO much work.

Definitely things I could have done differently but overall, we had a very successful night! We had about 75 parents/teachers with their kids come out so I am a very happy lady!

Art Club Workshop Today: Chihuly Chandelier

Art Club will meet today in room G5 after school from 3-4pm. Our project this month will be a Chihuly chandelier made of plastic bottles and tissue paper. This will be on display for our "Night of Art and Dr. Seuss" Show on May 24th.

This lesson came from the great Mr. E at Tulip Grove Elementary. We will try to make you proud Mr. E!

Graffiti Tag Names

I remember whenever I used to observe art classes in college, there was one high school art teacher in Union City, Hilary Webb, who did a unit over graffiti to her classes. I remember them coming up with so much awesome work and how much they LOVED learning about it. Ever since then, I knew I would want to teach graffiti to each of my classes every year.

If you are not teaching graffiti right now as an art teacher, I would strongly adivse you start. This is an amazing thing to teach on to our students. It's such a big part of their culture and generationa and it really does apply to them so much. I have taught graffiti to all ages, and I have yet to have a student (yes, even those troublesome ones!) who did not enjoy this unit.

I usually start off by a PowerPoint that opens up in discussion over the topic of graffiti. Do you think it should be illegal? Why or why not? What are some ways our cities can prevent art vandalism? I also make it clear to them that IT IS A CRIME if you graffiti property THAT IS NOT YOURS. Then I follow up with a lot of examples of graffiti from all over the world. The internet is FULL of amazing graffiti examples, and the kids will be so blown away!

I've done a wide variety of projects for graffiti. For 7th Grade I decided to keep it simple and assign them a "graffiti tag name" drawing. They all had to come up with a tag name, like all graffiti artists and create a signature. I loved this project! I feel like it was a great first time graffiti project especially for younger ages. When you get up higher in grades you can play around some and require them to draw more letters, but I was so impressed with these. They all had a lot of fun coming up with their own tag names too. Here are just a FEW that turned out awesome.

Art Show Prep

 This is going to be the first art show I have ever done in school! I am feeling really overwhelmed by how much awesome art I have gathered from my middle schoolers. Because this is my first time doing a school-wide art show, I am trying SO HARD not to stress!!! It has definitely been a lot of work preparing all of these art pieces. I really would have loved to mat them, but because of my budget being a little low towards the end of the year, and the fact that I don't have a mat cutter, I decided just to staple them to black paper. Overall, I think it's working very well and it's really been easy this way!

My main concern right now is having a wide variety and having around the same amount of items for each grade. I decided to have a seperate section for 6th, 7th, 8th and Art Club. Right now, 7th is hurting for more art work. I did something stupid and gave back ALL of my kids' art work to them the first semester of this year so now I am lacking those pieces big time. I'm trying to just track down some of my fall semester kids to tell them to bring me their work.

 8th Grade Section. We are missing their tape and monster sculptures here. 

 Part of my 6th grade section. They will have a TON of work to display.

 Some of my Art Club bubble paintings.

 

Art Club's melting crayon paintings. I LOVE HAILEY'S HEART!!!!

So when is the big day??? MAY 24. 5-7PM. It's going to be a great night!!! So excited!

 

Scratch Art Animals

WHEW!!!! It has been a BUSY month. We finished up TCAP last week and I got a MAD case of the upset stomach. So needless to say, I've been quite indisposed these last four weeks. My student teacher Jessica is now finished up with her time here and about to graduate at Cumberland :) She did a lot of fun projects with my kids while she was here so I decided to show them.

8th graders made tape sculptures and they are currently finishing up scratch art animal.

WHEW!!!! It has been a BUSY month. We finished up TCAP last week and I got a MAD case of the upset stomach. So needless to say, I've been quite indisposed these last four weeks. My student teacher Jessica is now finished up with her time here and about to graduate at Cumberland :) She did a lot of fun projects with my kids while she was here so I decided to show them.

8th graders made tape sculptures and they are currently finishing up scratch art animal.