Thursday, April 28, 2011

WiPs: Mini Masterpieces

Our latest endeavor in Interactive Art History is Mini Masterpieces. We are using water-mixable oils by Reeves on mini canvases. The students each have have a 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 sized canvas and when their paintings are done, they will each be given mini easels to take home and gift to their mothers for Mothers Day. (Remember how much I love doing project that correlate with holidays? I think it makes things a little more fun.)

The two periods of art history we focused on for this time frame were the Renaissance through to Post Impressionism. I know. It's a huge block of time. And most serious art history buffs cringe at the fact that I shove them through this part of art history so fast and then spend most of the time making a project anyway but this class is meant to be more project based than lecture and research anyway. Our project after this will be a subtractive sculpturing piece (relief sculpturing with carvable foam blocks) and we will actually jump back to Medieval art for inspiration of that. *sigh* I didn't want to hop and skip around but the Black History month 3-Vu pieces took almost triple time and in order to get the mini masterpieces done for Mothers day it had to be done like that. Anyway. Moving on.

I haven't done many WiP postings so I thought this would be a good one to show. Each of the students picked a style or specific piece of artwork to draw inspiration from and then they tried their best to do a stylized version of that. Because impressionistic stylings are easiest for most of the students, there are a lot in that style. They used the tiniest brushes we had and they will end up putting a solid week of class time just into the painting alone. They are LOVING this project and every other class (advanced studio classes included) have openly voiced their wishes to join in. This is a project that is reserved for the Art History students alone though. I see it as one of those bonus projects that really helps reel the students into a class that seems boring since they see the word history in the course name.










They should be finishing up this project tomorrow so there is enough time for these to dry and cure and be taken home for Mother's day.

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