Life as an art student | Day 17 of 20

Weird start to the day and week (the last one for this class - boo!) as this area was hit in a seriously bad way by all of those storms that hit the huge chunk of the mid Atlantic coast. I was blessed enough to lose power no longer than 24 hours but had a place (my parents' house) to stay in that had electricity, wifi and central air. Others in my area have not been so fortunate and are sitting at day three without any of the aforementioned. It has been projected that many of them might not even have power until this coming weekend! No bueno especially with regard to the record breaking temperature highs this time of year.

Anyway, all of this had me completely unsure if I would even have painting class. This last week was going to be focused on more landscape work created en plein air like last week because (with the 4th being no class) we only really have two days to paint since the last day (on Thursday) we are going to do a bit of a presentation of each of our collectives of work. Well, when I went to the picnic grove on campus where we have been working, I found the place looking pretty much like a war zone. Trees done, metal picnic tables damaged beyond repair, and nobody in my class (including my professor) there. I started emailing my professor and he eventually showed up to look at the damage and then made the executive decision to just go to the studio classroom. Thus, it was decided that we would do self-portraits after all. So, that's what we did today.

We started it all with a big discussion about what the expectation was for our output and then talked about how we get to that point. Today's working goal was to do a straight line drawing in charcoal of ourselves on paper with a focus on only the planes of the face.

Tomorrow we are supposed to be able to get right into painting. I am really jazzed to paint vs. do charcoal work and I am finally going to get to use the canvas I stretched on the second day of class.

WiPs: Junkmail portraits

I am in the process of culling finished student pieces of a recently finished lesson plan idea (for the Broken Window Painting) but here are some more images of my students working on their latest project that will be finished (hopefully!) the day before we break for Christmas vacation.

The project is called the Junkmail portrait and it's been one that has been mentally bookmarked in my swirl of ideas that I sometimes get from my blogroll. I originally saw featured on Craftzine and the artist who created them is Sandhi Schimmel. Obviously her works are incredibly impressive and indicative of years of experience and refined technique but I love taking inspiration from art/artists found via the interwebs because it forces my students to consider and sometimes become active fans and follow noteworthy artists of today. Years ago the 2D students did a take on this idea so I have some old student samples of collage portraits in a similar fashion but for this project I really just kind of showed them a handful of finished pieces of work, encouraged some light discussion about ways to go about it and then just pushed them in the direction to get started in whatever way they felt their piece needed.

Here are some of the beginnings of what I am certain will be some pretty remarkable student artwork samples...

I opted to let the students pick individuals of whomever they might like as a way of encouraging their greatest investment in their work from the get-go and also allowed them to try out transfer paper as a way of getting the layout and placement of the face/details of the face in the most accurate way possible. They've been free-hand drawing and thumbnailing for the whole semester and the transfer paper was a tool they have been excited to use as way to work "smarter not harder."