Personal choice paintingsTowards the end of each semester of 8th grade art, students are given an opportunity to show off their painting skills with the chance to create a personal choice painting. Students spend time researching painting inspiration, then create a rough draft exploring what types of things make a painting successful. For example: what will the focal point be? Did you fill the whole paper? Large and small details? What colors will you use? Is it challenging enough?
The students always surprise me each year with their ability to be creative! We have paintings of Disney characters, to landscapes, to sports and beyond. |
Powerful Words
Powerful words is a lesson we do that helps us to learn more about sign language. We first take a day to practice the sign language alphabet. Students then practice drawing hands in the alphabet signing position and choose a word that they would like to represent in their artwork. The idea of the project is to choose a "powerful word" something that has meaning. We make the analogy that even though people who are deaf may not communicate the same way we do, they still are capable of emotion and powerful communication. This lesson is always an eye opening experience and we enjoy learning more about sign language and art combined.
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Abstract colored pencil
Washington D.c. Trip themed drawings
Each November our 8th Grade students and their teachers go on a field trip to Washington D.C. This year over 100 students and their teacher chaperones boarded a bus and embarqed on their journey to site see. They see all sorts of monuments, attend different museums and get to stay over night in a hotel with their friends. For this art project, students traveling to D.C were asked to draw a picture that represented what they were most looking forward to about their trip. As you can see everyone had a different perspective, from looking forward to seeing monuments, to getting to choose what they were going to eat at the food court.
Monochromatic paintings
For this project students chose a picture of a famous person that they liked/admired. From there students had a mini lesson in photoshop where we transformed the image from a real photo to a posterized black and white photo. We then printed the edited images on transparencies and projected them on the walls of the art room. Students then were able to enlarge the projected image and trace what they saw to get the basis for their paintings. Afterwards students selected a color, plus white and black, to paint the monochromatic paintings. They turned out even better than I could have expected!!
watercolor and acrylic animals
In this two part project students draw half or all of a photo of an animal. We then add color with watercolor trays and watercolor pencils. The focus of this project is painting textures. How do we paint something to look like it has fur, or scales, or is rough or soft. Students learn about layering colors and mixing colors to get the true color of the animal. Afterwards, students do the same project with acrylic paints. Doing the project twice with a different medium allows the students to really compare and contrast the watercolor paints to the acrylic paints.
Group paper mache aliens
For this project students were broken up into groups of 4 or 5 and set out to design an alien. Using any recyclable objects that we were able to collect (egg cartons, cardboard, newspaper) the students created the armature or skeleton that would be the inside of their alien. From there we used glue and newspaper and paper mached the entire sculpture to give us a smooth surface to paint on, then with a little help from our local hardware store who donated paint (and my parents who also donated paint) the students brought their aliens to life with color! The sculptures sat and welcomed students to the art classroom for two years, but sadly met their recycling maker in the spring of 2016 to make room for new sculptures.