Springman Visual Arts

The Equinox Team has been hard at work creating ceramic vessels, looking at the conoptic jars created in the funerary / mummification process of the ancient Egyptians. The vessels are created by forming two pinch pot for the body of the vessels, and a third, smaller pot for the stoppers. Students have been asked to “modernize” their jars, choosing different organs or body parts to immortalize in their interpretation of the conoptic jar. We looked at the principles of art movement & rhythm to be exemplified in the pots, as well as utilizing both additive and subtractive sculptural techniques. Check back to see images of the completed vessels soon, and click the image here to see the work in progress!

The Equinox team has finished up on their CD paintings and the backside designs for the CD’s with some great stories as well as outstanding paintings. Students were asked to create a fictional band in any style, then use the principle of art emphasis to highlight a part of their painting. We also looked at learning some advanced painting techniques, focusing on the impressionistic wet on wet mixing of colors and values. The subject matter of the albums was left open, and we have everything from Techno to Holiday music represented. Only the paintings are on display here, to see and read the creative writings that the students did check out the halls of Springman as well as the District 34 administrative building in the month of February when Springman and Attea will be hanging the Middle School Art show in the large meeting space! Click on Patryk L.’s example here to go to a gallery of the finished paintings.

The kids in the art club spent a lot of time over the break  creating the sets for our upcoming production of “The Wizard Of Oz”. Students came in over 5 days for 6 hours a day during the first week of the holiday break to build and paint the large pieces of the set. I want to thank all the kids who dedicated so much of their time and effort! Click on the images here to see a gallery of the work as it has been progressing. Students will be continuing with building the set for the next few weeks, then we will be switching gears and start working on the lighting and sound for this years production. Again great job over the break Art Club Members!

This week we have seen a lot of interesting ideas starting to form in our first painting project in the art room. Students have been creating their own interpretation of the art used on an album cover. We spent some time learning about the history of artwork created as album covers, looking first at the work of Alex Steinweiss a graphic designer at Columbia Records in the 1930’s who was credited with creating the first album cover artwork. We looked at how color, shape, line, and value, was used to create emphasis in Mr. Steinweiss’s work. We also looked at how these same elements could give the work the ability to communicate moods, feeling, emotions, and ideas. We started our ideas by creating three thumbnail sketches, and will be continuing over the course of the next few classes by refining and choosing designs to use for an acrylic painting. Students who need another copy of the sketch sheet can download one from the resources page.

Ms. Asplund, Attea’s art teacher, shared a great site for color with me recently and since we just reviewed color in class I thought you all would be interested in it! The site was created by Graphic Designer Claudia Cortes for a Master of Fine Arts Thesis at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Kudos to her for an outstanding interactive color experience! You will need to have “Adobe Flash” on your computer for the site to work. There is a lot of good info about the moods that color can create in the videos and links at Ms. Cortes’ site that relate to the painting project we are starting, so click on the image here to get to her site!

Hey guys, The idea of how to show form in your vocabulary folders came up in class today, and one suggestion was the Japanese art “form” of folded paper, Origami. Surfing the web I found some sites that had directions for ideas on origami forms. You can also surf the web to find more on Origami!

• Free Origami diagrams and instructions (there’s a lot here!)
• Origami fortune teller
• Origami Pyramid
• Rythmic paper sculpture

Remember, your goal is to create a form that is 3D, so don’t choose an example that will be flat!

Hey Equinox team members, welcome back to the Art Room! I hope you had a great 1st trimester and are ready to begin your visual art experience. I am looking forward to working with all of my former students as well as those of you who have not been in the art room before. Because your fine arts rotation is now on the “B” block schedule we will be able to have much more time for our projects and will be going into greater depth with our exploration of the visual arts. This week we only met on Friday, so time was spent covering the classroom expectations and requirements. Next week we will be looking at reviewing the elements of art. reviewing the use of this site, and discussing our first project.

The Explorer team has come to the end of it’s fine arts experience for 7th grade this week.  The team did a great job participating, creating and evaluating their work. Prints and Tie-Dye’s have been returned to the students. Work created earlier in the trimester will be returned to students towards the end of the year after the two art shows we participate in. It’s always sad to see the end of a trimester, students who are interested in continuing in visual arts should consider attending art club, we meet on Mondays and Wednesdays. I hope to see you there!

This week in art we have been working on creating graphic designs to print on the tie-dye shirts we made the week before. The students were introduced to the concept of  graphic design by figuring out what a graphic designer might do. We looked at the relationship of client - designer - consumer, focusing on how a graphic designer interacts with clients to create artwork that will be used to communicate with a consumer. For our project, we will be creating silk screened designs to communicate 3 important facts about the student artist visually using imagery in place of text. We created high contrast designs that work well for the hand cut stencils and will continue  on this through next week. Click on the image here to see an enlargement of the work that block 1  has produced so far. Also, the final load of ceramics is in the kiln today and the work will be assessed over the next few days. Students will be glazing their clay work during next 2 week’s classes as well as printing their graphic designs.

This week in art was a splash of color! Explorer students created tie dye shirts in class, using the soda soak method of dying. We learned about how compression and capillary action work to make the dye flow or be restricted in the shirts. We looked at how the folding of the shirt creates the pattern that we see on the shirts, combining an “Accordion Fold”, “Brain Coral Fold”, and a “Spiral Fold” into unique designs. We talked about color mixing and how the dye will flow to create new colors. Our final day of the week we started to discuss the work of graphic designers in preparation for our final project involving silk screen printing. We will be continuing with this project for the next two weeks. If you need a copy of the washing instructions for the tie-dye click on image in this post!