School Closing

My district is shifting to distance learning for the remainder of the year. Electives will not be provided. Take care of yourselves and your families. Here is an anitivirus coloring sheet if you’re locked down for a while.

Hidden Lizard Highlights

Students are working on their hidden lizards project. They create a composition featuring a background component and creatures than have a design on their bodies with a special relationship to the background. Students may optionally choose to explore some final touches to their finished design by adding shading, cast shadows, or highlights.

Marker/Colored Pencil Layering

Recently, I put together some example swatches with colored pencil blending on top of marker. This technique gives students the ability to blend and control their color with much bolder and smoother results. It also makes colored-pencil look less like colored-pencil by eliminating the expected white paper texture showing through.

Near Extinct Artist Palettes

For years, I have used glossy magazine pages as paint mixing palettes in my middle school art classes. They work in most situations where wax paper palettes would be useful. They are free, resistant to liquid paint and, until recently, plentiful. That has been the perceived problem for a while now. Clearly, magazines in our …
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Metallic Scratch Art

Students recently completed a scratch-art project on silver or gold metallic scratch board. In this example, the student used a reference animal graphic and chose to fill in the sections on the design using intricate patterns and designs. The lesson emphasizes the use of texture shading and using value and contrast to make details easily …
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Shared Student Work

Thanks to Kim & Karen: 2 Soul Sisters (Art Education Blog) for sharing photos and a link with the results of students using some of my resources. Photos of student work is my favorite kind of feedback to receive.

Animal Art Projects

By request, this Animal Color Thumbnails (click the link) PDF file depicts color thumbnails of the Animals in my Animal Op-Art TPT product for those who would like a realistic representation of the op-art animal designs. These are also the animals included in my Pastel Animal Project as well as the Animal Op-Art Coloring Book edition.

Beste Liner Brushes

I recently purchased some Beste Finest Golden Taklon Hair liner brushes from Jerry’s Artarama for use on our comic panel paintings in tempera paint. I chose these brushes primarily because of the price and I was particular in wanting a long haired liner brush for those students who wished to try outlining their paintings in black …
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Mechanical Drawing Heart Designs

This week, students began creating Kaleidoscope Heart Designs. I like to have them do some variety of this type of art each year. Our first step is to create a blank heart template on 18×18″ white paper. Each student creates theirs from a demonstration I lead using a compass and ruler. One of the primary challenges is …
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Painting in the Classroom

I have had good results using tempera paint for middle school art. Being water soluble means that I never have to be concerned about paint spills or brushes and materials not being cleaned completely. Tempera paint can sit for a year and still be dissolved easily in water. I recommend avoiding the cheapest tempera and go …
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Op-Art Eggs

Last month, my students completed their Op-Art egg designs.We used a combination of marker and colored-pencil to create interesting color schemes on these pre-printed graphics. The focus was on contrast and blending as well as good shading techniques.

Scratch Art Tiki Face Designs

We recently completed a scratch-art project using Tiki inspired symmetrical faces as subject matter. For this project, I chose to use the largest student-grade scratch material I could find. I believe the sheets were 11×13″. We discussed and practiced symmetrical transfer to create our own Tiki faces. I also made available a set of pre-printed …
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Rennovation Progress

I visited my old classroom last month to check out the progress on the renovations. They had the wallboard up and appeared to be working on the heating/AC duct work. No significant room layout change other than an added storage room, lower ceiling and it appear I will have less windows.

Scratch Art Tiki

We have been working on scratch art activities recently. For our final project, students will create a “carved” tiki-style face. We will emphasize giving the illusion of 3 dimensions while communicating a linear wood texture. Students can create their own face image or use my printable resources.