Before I start this project, I introduce the idea of creating different values in using a pen. I model stippling, scumbling, hatching, and cross hatching and students follow along taking 'notes' in their sketchbooks. 

Since I do this project with Art 1, I also go through the steps of how to find an image on google that is not copyrighted (change the image search settings to 'creative commons licenses' and change the color to black and white usually helps them narrow it down). See example above. 

Then, I explain how to put the image into google drawings, adjust the size and I even take the time to teach them how to email the image to me so that I can print it off for them. (Students cannot print from my room, they have to go to the library). I also show them how to convert the image to black and white in google drawing. 
Since I am also using this project to introduce the idea of grid drawing, it is helpful for them to have a black and white printed copy of their vehicle. We draw our 'vehicles' on 9X12 paper, and I have them resize the image in google drawings to 4.5X6 and draw a half inch grid on it with a ruler once it is printed. On their actual drawing paper, they draw a 1" grid and the ratios match up pretty well. I take a few minutes to teach them how to read a ruler before they start the measuring process. 

This lesson covers a LOT of things in art 1 that we establish at the beginning of the year. One more thing I added this year was the discussion of 'ellipse' which is the way the tire gets stretched out in an image, and doesn't look like a perfect circle, I encourage them to trust the grid!!!

Pen and Ink Vehicle Drawing                

Materials: ballpoint pen, calligraphy pen, ultra fine sharpie OR other ink pen (microns work great), ruler, pencil

 
Step one: Find a black and white picture of a vehicle of your choice. You can photocopy it from a book or print it from the internet. It can be any vehicle as long as

• The picture has dark areas, midtones, and highlights
• The photo takes up a full 8.5X11 paper (or use 9X12 drawing paper)
• It is a photo and not a drawing. 
• I suggest using a photo from the creative commons. If you choose to use a photo you have taken, convert it to black and white and boost the contrast! 

Step Two: Email the photo to Mrs. Mitchell. Put the photo on a new google drawing or a google doc and then share it so she can print it out for you. 
Step Three: Draw a grid on your photo. Draw a proportional grid on your drawing paper. 

• Optional: You can use the app Grid# but you will want to make sure to put square grid boxes on the photo, 9 boxes on the longest edge and 6 on the short edge.
• If you are using a chromebook, use the website: Art Tutor Grid to add a grid to the photo

Step Four:  Lightly transfer the image using the grid method in pencil. Once you have transferred the image, you can begin erasing the grid lines. 

​Step Five: Use hatching, cross-hatching, contour lines, stippling, scumbling to create the VALUES and TEXTURES in the image. Erase all old pencil lines. 

Examples of good HIGH Contrast images. You can also edit a photo in Pixlr: turn it to black and white and bump up the contrast. ​

If you have trouble drawing the portrait in proportion, you can use the grid method. 

​

This is a fun project that my students enjoy because it is 'different'. The smell of the coffee, the novelty of painting with something that isn't paint, and the abundance of examples available online make it intriguing to my high schoolers. I use it as a warm up to watercolor. We create a monochromatic version of nearly everything we do as an introduction to the material. The info below is what I provide as a handout and you can see my example of the test sheet below too. I usually have them do the 'test' on a 6X9 piece and put their name on it for a grade. We use watercolor paper for the test sheet and the real painting. Students are encouraged to draw really lightly and look up more examples before beginning. I encourage them not to copy someone else's painting, because there are so many examples, they have to make it their own. We use instant coffee, they can put it on paint palettes and leave it to dry and reuse them over and over again. 

COFFEE PAINTING

MONOCHROMATIC refers to a color scheme that is made up of one color in a variety of values and even tones of that same color.  As an example – if you add white to red – you will get a variety of pinks.   If you add black to red – you will get a variety of darker versions of red. 

 In watercolor – we usually don’t use white or black when painting – but rather take one color and dilute it with water.  This creates a variety of values of that same color.   

YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE A GOOD OVERALL CONCEPT/COMPOSITION…

• This means choosing an illustration that can have a wide range of lights to darks. 
  
• Thus choosing a composition with a great light source is key.  This will lead to dramatic lighting – which will pop your illustration off of the paper.   
  
• Choose a drawing that fills the entire page.  These types of compositions lead themselves well to monochromatic studies and almost seem to pop off the page at you.   Remember watercolor is built on glazing – or layering.  Some colors layer really well – whereas others not so much.   So best to test it before you try it. 
  

Practice the following techniques on your test sheet: 

• Value Scale--try to get as dark/light as possible
  
• GLAZING---let one layer dry completely (hair dry if necessary) before adding another layer to make it darker. 
  
• Salt--while the paint is wet, sprinkle salt
  
• Wax Resist --use a white crayon to block out white areas and then paint over it
  

Done with your test sheet? Tape your watercolor paper to a clipboard with blue tape and lightly draw your image in pencil. 

I developed a new project this year that could be done in many different grade levels. It worked well as an introduction to watercolor painting for my Art 1 students. I ended up letting my student teacher wrap up the project, but it was pretty successful for most students. I was also a nice 'seasonal' activity that we started just before Christmas break and wrapped up in January. It provided that winter bridge between semesters. 

If I teach this again, I will have students focus more on the snow globe stand and mask the background to keep it clean....or have a plan for how to finish the white part of the paper, which got a little dirty and rough edges messed up some of the otherwise nice paintings. I will also bring in more actual snow globes to show as examples, I don't own any and had to borrow one for the explanation of how the glass has white reflections on the surface. 

Also, they need to block out the 'white' reflection really well in order to make a convincing glass globe. 

I encouraged them to use some watered down white paint on a toothbrush to create the 'snow' on top as a finishing touch. Because of a million snow days, we didn't actually get to display them during winter, and it felt too late to do it by the time we got back to school. I wanted to share them here, because I am proud of this work!!

This is my absolute favorite time of year as a teacher. All the routines and procedures are in place and the classroom environment is established. All the relationships are built--as students and as teachers--we’ve pushed each other---and we have found a balance.  This is the time of year when we get to look back and see everything we have accomplished over the school year---this is award season, when we get to celebrate our successes and everything we have accomplished. This is the time of year, when we ship home their artwork, clean out their lockers and send them out into the world with as much love and knowledge as we could impart on them over the course of one school year.

This is the time of year when we can see the benchmarks we have met and the progress we have made.  This is the time of year when we’ve met all the deadlines and squeezed in all of the objectives. As EOC and state testing wraps up each spring, we have a little more flexibility in our school day. This is the time of year that most teachers live for--we save our best selves for this season. This is the time of year when we shine. 

This is the time of year when we take a moment with our students and just have fun---because we’ve earned it. Spring is the season for field trips, popsicle parties, picnic lunches, and other extra special fun activities that we save for the end because we want our students to leave our classes with a feeling---a memory of a feeling---that will stay with them for their entire lives. 

We want them to remember that even if they didn’t master all of the ‘learning’ requirements, then maybe we made them feel special--and sometimes it takes all year to get to that good place---for some kids, this is the best part of the school year because it is the most fun and we live for that joy.  We know that we are connected to these kids forever. There is something incredibly special about the relationship between a student and a teacher, and if you’ve had a great teacher, then you know what I’m talking about. 

Parents, when teachers say that they miss their students, when we tell you that we miss your kids (the ones that you’ve been cooped up with for weeks!), I hope you know how sincerely we are grieving over the loss of this time. This is a season we will never get back. As educators, we’ve prepared our entire lives/careers to be in the school cycle--we HAVE to have closure at the end of the school year...this isn’t just an extended vacation for us, it is a great loss….we love your kids and it is painful to transition online because we can’t make a feeling digital. When we say we love teaching, THIS is the time of year we love. 

Being a teacher is who I am, but facilitating an online class isn’t what I signed up for.  It's all the other stuff, the memories, the fun, the good times, the celebrations. If you are struggling with online learning, getting into a routine or just all that ‘togetherness’, just know that teachers are struggling with the separation. I can speak for my teacher friends when I say, “give your kids a hug” from their teachers.  We love and miss them. 

Teachers everywhere are grieving right now, because we know that we might've missed an opportunity to make an essential connection with a student. We know that timing, classroom environment and relationships can align in April, unlike any other time of the year. We know that kids sometimes get a little unruly in the last few weeks because they need the balance and routine that they ONLY get at school.
I know that I might have missed the one chance I had to make a difference for the one kid that needed it the most and that makes me absolutely heartbroken. I know that we will get back to normal some day and this is only temporary, but I am sad about this season, this year and the missed opportunities to develop a fond love of learning and school.

​

​“Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist” and the mistaken concept of necessary talent”
― Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

After attending Amy Potts' presentation at the MAEA Spring Conference 2019 - Kansas City, Missouri: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workshop I decided to adopt some of the activities into my classroom practices because my Art 1 students were having such a tough time seeing and drawing. 

A little about Betty Edwards, the author:
She received a Bachelor's in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, 1947), a Master's of Art from California State University, Northridge, and a Doctorate in Art, Education, and Psychology from UCLA (1976).

An artist and painter, she taught at high school level in the Los Angeles public school district (Venice High School), then at community college, and from 1978 until her retirement in 1991, in the Art Department at California State University, Long Beach. All of her teaching experience has been in art: drawing, painting, art history, art-teacher training, and color theory. In addition to teaching drawing workshops around the world, she has also done business consulting with major national and international corporations to enhance creative problem solving.

Although there is evidence to suggest that left-brained/right-brained is a myth I believe these drawing exercises with improve your drawing and are good for your brain.

Drawing is a TEACHABLE, LEARNABLE skill.  Like reading: once you have the basic skill, further achievement just requires practice, and, perhaps, expanding one’s vocabulary.

Present the brain with a task the left brain either can’t or won’t handle.


There are 5 basic component skills:

1. The perception of edges (seeing where one thing ends and another starts)
2. The perception of spaces (seeing what lies beside and beyond)
3. The perception of relationships (seeing in perspective and in proportion)
4. The perception of lights and shadows (seeing things in degrees of values)
5. The perception of gestalt (seeing the whole and its parts) p xxv

EXERCISES

Face-Vase Exercise p 46
http://www.drawright.com/try-an-exercise 

Right handed→ Left handed→

Upside-down Drawing 
Exercise:

• draw for about an hour
• Finish in one sitting
• Do NOT turn your drawing or the image right side up while drawing
• Start in one corner and work your way across and down or up
• Think about shape and relationship (NOT about what you are drawing)

Draw the negative spaces of a chair

Draw your hand
Draw your hand several times - use different poses    

Draw a profile of a real person

Reading this book has profoundly changed my instructional practices. Since I had started reading the book at the end of last year, it gave me some observational data on how some of the techniques could change the classroom culture and art making practices. This year, I implemented the warm up techniques at the beginning of the year, students drew specific things in their sketchbooks as bellwork and now all of my classes are able to get focused and in the 'zone' pretty much every day when we utilize the strategies.

Students' drawing skills and my ability to explain certain things have improved as a result of reading this book. Explaining to students the science behind how their brains respond to certain activities helped them to understand how art can help them focus and what they need to do in order to prepare their brains for art making, which has helped with goal setting and overall productivity.The object is to:  Present your brain with activities that cause your L-brain to drop out:  regard negative spaces, play a game, go for a bike ride, go jogging, cook a special meal, pray, draw.

I decided to combine the activities in the book with my daily bell work over the course of a week or two AND I presented the activities with research based on my student surveys. Students had said that I don't spend enough time making the course relevant in their lives, so I decided to make that a priority at the beginning of the year with the information in the slide show. 

Technically, I came right home last spring and created this slideshow and implemented it at the end of last year and then I started the beginning of this year with this same information and I believe that I have gotten off on a much better start with my students overall. The activities helped them to be more focused and calm at the beginning of class, which has been really nice to help them to focus and 'get in the zone' or flow of working. 

Here is a link to my slideshow which shows how I present the information in the classroom. 

Last year, my students drew vehicles using scratchboard. They could draw any vehicle: plane, train, car, bike, hot air balloon, their actual first car, their dream car. It was a great prompt!

We printed black and white photos of the vehicle, put chalk pastel on the back and traced over the outlines to transfer it to the scratchboard surface and they used 'pen and ink' techniques to create the different values. They turned out great, as you can imagine (I put a few at the bottom of this post) because we were basically tracing all the hard stuff.

​This year, I wanted to teach them the grid drawing method a little earlier in the year so they could use it to draw things later, if it helps them....so we selected an image of a vehicle and grid drew it on white paper. Then, we used ball point pens to create the values. 

I used the paper mate ink joy ball point pens in black because they fit into my budget and I ordered them on amazon at the last minute, but there are a lot of great pens out there that would work. 

Here is the slide show I used to introduce the project with some more examples. 

This lesson was adapted from a TPT lesson plan that I purchased. 

Last year, I totally dropped the ball on teaching perspective. I just never had all of the resources ready in a way that made sense. As a result, my advanced art class has no idea how to use perspective and it was really limiting what they could do.  So this year, I finally assembled the perfect combination of resources and we had some great results. 

My art 1 students used the handout (linked below) to practice the basic steps of perspective. Then, they could design their own 'spooky scene' on brown, black or gray 12X18 paper. Students could continue to use the handout, or they could expand and use one of the step-by-step packets from the TPT spooky scene resource collection, or if they wanted a challenge, they could use one of the videos (or design their own using the technique) from the you tube playlist.

In art 1, they could color the scene with chalk pastels, black/white charcoal, or colored pencils. My advanced art class could use anything, which is where the watercolor and pen and ink compositions came from. The cozy bedroom drawing was done in colored pencil and she followed along with one of the videos in the youtube playlist for the majority of the elements in the scene. 


Youtube Playlist --I linked this on canvas so they could just use the videos to follow along. 
Handout from TPT --everyone had to practice this basic drawing in their sketchbooks first. 
Packet from TPT --definitely worth the money! I can't show you my slide show because I used several images from this purchase to help explain how to use perspective. It was great for kids who were struggling to understand how to use a ruler, because there are step-by-step photos on how to align the ruler to the vanishing point. 

Last year's room tour. This year was so much easier because I am not moving art rooms! I'm simplifying a few things and improving organization overall but not much is changing! 

I dyed all of the fabric on my bulletin boards and desk using the shibori method and it is still looking good so I decided to leave it up. I used liquid starch to 'adhere' it to the front of my metal desk and staples to affix it to the cork boards. 

I decided to make a supply station to hold my supplies and this is a little more centralized and not directly under the portfolio shelves so I think it will work out a lot better. I added nails on the side of the bookshelf to hold the rulers, protractors and some circle templates and I tired to put all of the 'art 1 supplies on one side. 

I love the size of my room. I have a class that is split with half students in advanced 2D design and half in 3D design (with a few in AP classes). The size of the space allows me to have some working on wheels or hand building while others are in more focused drawing/painting activities. I changed the layout from 4-desk tables to 3-desk groupings facing the front. I hope this will be a welcome change. 

The rug in this book corner is from World Market, it is for patios so I think it will take a lot of wear and tear. 

View from the back of the room looking towards my desk. I love having a T.V. to use for displaying announcements, showing videos and slideshows. 

 I decided to add lighting under these cabinets. I found some on amazon and the wire shelves are from Home Depot. I wanted to make this space a little more user friendly for hot-glue guns, wood burners and chrome books, so I added the power strips with velcro tape.  

Bought these. Ended up not liking the motion sensor and had them re-wired to not use the motion sensor, plugged them into a switch that I can command with a remote.  

The wire shelf with cleaning supplies is new this year! The mirror I made mid year from a mirror sent to me from Wayfair....it arrived broken so I used the shards to make a mosaic to look like a mirror from the Jungalow. 

I decided to be more consistent with cell phone rules this year so I made a 'jail' charging station so that the phones have a safe place to go if they are becoming a distraction....I added a couple of chargers, but plenty of spots for multiple students to charge them at once. Link to pocket chart. Link to power strip. 

Here is a view of my cabinets without lighting and before the wire shelving was installed. 

I don't think everything will ever be 100% organized but its fun to make it better each year. Thanks for reading!

I'm also including my amazon wish list, in case you want to se what I did not buy this year but I would like to have for the room in the future. 

TThe last week of June, I was selected to participate in the Educators ArtLab at the Kansas City Art Institute. To get into the program, I had to submit a digital portfolio of my work and my student's work. There were 3 options for 'Major Studio': painting, product design and photography. I am so glad that I was chosen to participate in the Painting Major Studio. I was one of 11 other teachers from around the country and we worked with the amazing professor Jonah Criswell. 

Going in, I really did not know what to expect. We had a supply list to bring with us, but I didn't know anyone else who would be part of the program so I was excited to make friends with some new art teachers. I did not realize that they would be from so many far away places...I thought many would be from Missouri, but there were only three or four other Missouri teachers in the entire program. I was taking the residency as a class and paid a little extra to get 2 graduate level studio art credits. 

We stayed in the residence hall and ate mostly in the student cafeteria for meals. The first thing we did when we got to campus and were settled in, was to take a tour. Many famous artists have attended the Art Institute including Nick Cave and Walt Disney. We got to see many of the art studios and facilities on campus. 

The first night, they treated us to a wonderful meal in the restaurant of the Kemper Museum. The meal was good, and it gave us a chance to break the ice and start talking to other teachers and find out where they were from. At my table, there were teachers from Ohio, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. 

That night, a few of us took a walk over to the Nelson-Atkins just to check it out. 

The next day we started our first class on campus. The 11 of us painters went to the painting building, while the product design people were in the lab designing stuff to be 3D printed and the photographers were planning their photo series for the week. The photography and product design groups were a little smaller. I heard that painting was the largest group because so many people want to do the painting class, but it is hard to get into. In fact, there were a couple people in the other studios that really wanted to be in painting but did not get in. I felt proud that I had been selected. 

That morning, Jonah did a demo on how to get started painting from a live model. He went over how to set up our palette with warm/cool colors and how to look at the lighting in the mostly white room. He learned our names quickly and I was very impressed by how funny and engaging he was as an instructor. 

When you take a class like this, it is always funny because you think that you know a lot about art, until you hear someone else explain it better...and then you realize that you don't know anything and you start to doubt yourself and try to hold in all of the information as much as you can. The new input wants to burst out as quickly as it goes in, I wanted to write down every nugget of information so that it would stick in my brain. 

After working from the model in two poses, I've never went straight into painting from a model, with no time do sketch things out, and mixing colors on the fly because she will only be in the pose for 45 minutes to an hour, you have to work so fast. Our assignment after the model finished was to select a part of our painting and blow it up bigger, to create an abstraction. 

We had lunch and then Jonah gave a great lecture on art history. He talked about Abstraction, Modernity and Modernism. 

My main take away from this lecture was thinking about how atmosphere, zeitgeist, process and existentialism influenced the artists in the abstraction movement differently. Also, society was changing and people of the middles classes were trying to find a language to describe internal feelings and struggles. They borrowed terms from music to describe art and and color became a metaphor. 

Great quotes: "The reconstruction of society, nature, the mind and material construction became a frontier for thought in ways that previous generations were not able to entertain, due to the power and disposition of entrenched institutions."


"As older institutions lost power, there was a search for newer ones, spirituality underwent many avant garde changes, the personal, mystic experience was often at the center of surrealist and abstract artists interest, ritual occult practices, although not popular were also en vogue. The independence streak of Modern people’s zeitgeist resisted the success of this kind of new medieval iconography but it remains an undercurrent, complimenting Freud through Jung."​

After the lecture, we were able to move our stuff into individual studios upstairs. Here, we could work on whatever we wanted as artists. We had all afternoon to work and we did! All the way until dinner. Jonah came around while we were working and talked to us individually about our work. He told me to check out some contemporary painters: Susan Lichtman and Eve Mansdorf. 

Tuesday was a lot like Monday with a lot of time to work from the model in the morning, and a lecture in the afternoon. Tuesday morning, we had to take a piece from someone else's artwork and repaint it, continuing it on abstractly to create a new image. 

My take away from the lecture was that people started to use less content, with the purpose of imposing a strong feeling about an image to invoke meaning. Many connections were made with contemporary artists and how they relate to the original abstract artists in the early 20th century. (Julie Mehretu, Dana Schutz)

Quote from the lecture:
"Modernism is the title given to a kind of aesthetic ideaology, or project that was in some ways superimposed upon the activities of many artists, thinkers, architects etc. Its fundamental argument is that the new age required a new orientation of the traditional arts to more sufficiently explain being and thought. Industrialization, Darwinism, modularity and the rise of American culture and industry (due to its remaining infrastructure after ww1 and ww2) allowed for this notion of “newness” to be deeply inspiration in midcentury American artists."

My biggest take away from this lecture was how does it feel to be alive as an artist in the world right now? 
​

Can I just say that when you are trying to synthesize such deep information, decoding what it means to you and recreating new artwork based on new input and new ways of looking at the world, that is some heavy stuff. Tonight, myself and another artist decided to skip dinner and keep working and then grab something later. We worked until 6:00 and then went to a little gallery show at the H&R Block Space. After the gallery show, we took an Uber down to the Crossroads district. I took them to a couple of my favorite KC places (Extra Virgin for tapas and the Green Lady Lounge) and before heading back to the Art Institute, we walked up to the Power and Light District. We took an Uber back to campus. 

Wednesday morning, I got up early but I was tired. We realized that this would be the last day with the model because we needed to wrap stuff up on Thursday to prepare for an art show on Friday. We painted a beautiful composition of the model in a lounge chair. I didn't really like any of my paintings of the model, I told Jonah that what I was doing in the class was just playing around but what I did upstairs was 'business'. You can see one of my paintings from the model session below, along with my studio space and a photo of the painting building. 

Wednesday was a tiring day. We painted from the model, and our assignment was to think about warm and cool reds/yellows/and blues as a way to create depth. Warmth of the paper can activate cools, or cool paper makes cools recede. 

Jonah was not afraid to paint right on our paintings to demonstrate something. "What is this, work for your show at the louvre," he joked. Jonah encouraged us to find 5 hours a week to work on our own artwork. He said that teachers are like Ferraris, we are always on and moving fast. 

Wednesday afternoon, we worked in our studios and after dinner, Jennifer and I walked to a little pub in Westport. We did not stay long and then we went to bed early. Thursday, I woke up early to put some extra time in the studio. I was in my studio by 6:00, I was the first one over there and I made a lot of progress on my painting. 

Thursday morning, we did not work from the model, we just worked in our studios. After lunch, we walked over to the Nelson-Atkins to see the 30 Americans Show. After that, we carpooled to the West Bottoms to see Jonah's studio. Dinner that night was in the banquet hall on campus, they catered Q39 BBQ for us. After a presentation about portfolios from the recruiting office, we had to hang our show in the gallery. 

Friday morning, we took down our work from the show and moved it into the painting room for our critiques. We critiqued 5 students and then took a break and critiqued 5 more, spending about 10-12 minutes on each one. Before the critiques, Jonah talked to us about critiques, how to use nonverbal cues, and have a written option for students. 

Jonah provided very thoughtful insight into our work and gave each of us very different advice. He told me: "You are a very gifted artist. You are running on a 6 cylindar but you don't turn it on very often. You need to trust your instincts with your camera, don't be afraid to make it uglier. You can make art that looks good, but you've done that before you have found yourself as an artist. You have a need to be a good wife, career, friend and artist at the same time, you need to make artwork that is like if you won the lottery/ship is going down." 

Wow, I've never had a critique like that in my life. It felt good to be noticed as an artist and a person and to be respected. 

After the critique, we had lunch at the Nelson-Atkins in their beautiful restaurant. We rehung our artwork for the show real quick and then we invited the 'public' in to see the work.


​Not many people came to see, but it was fun to see what the photography students and the product design students had been working on.



Also, I won a prize for my social media use of our hashtag (you can use it to see more images from the week on instagram) #kcaieal #eal2019  My prize was geli plates!