The Line Has Been Drawn

This class was a little bit daunting for me because I am not the strongest drawer and I tend to get frustrated when my vision is not translating properly on the paper. It was definitely learning experience and I had a lot of fun experimenting with different lines in the booklets that we created. Something that i learned is that it is much easier to draw when you split your page into four different parts. This assists you with the sizing and distance of object.

We were also provided with three different objects and asked to sketch them in their proper perspectives on a piece of paper, of which will be painted in a future class. I’m really excited to work with the paint because it is a medium that you can have fun with and experiment with different colours. I really liked being able to compare my sketch with my friends that were sitting at the table because everyone has talents in all different forms. Additionally, I enjoyed doing the squiggle activity where we each added something to the squiggle drawings that we made. It was also interesting to see how close our drawings were to Sabrina’s description, and I think that this would be a great activity to incorporate into the classroom. I would separate the students into  groups and have one student read out the instructions and have the others draw, or I could read the descriptions to the whole class , similar to how we completed the activity.

Van Gogh

Today we covered different forms of assessment for art as it can be difficult to mark a student's creativity. I learned a lot about different artists and what techniques they have used to create some of their most famous works. I chose to use Van Gogh on one side of my pastel artwork and Matisse on the other to represent colour blocking. This was a difficult task for me because the pastel was not allowing me to craft perfect lines like I would have liked. I think that in order to improve the activity I would offer a different medium, preferably crayons or pencil crayons as they offer more guidance and can be fixed more easily. I found that the pastels were not suitable for this artwork as they smudged all over the page and it was hard to find a pastel with a finer tip to make a line. Markers would also work better for the Van Gogh side as they can produce the same sized line every time they touch the paper.

I also learned about the difference between cool and warm toned colours and how to tell your students what colours classify as. I found the chart in the classroom to be very beneficial and I would like to have one of these charts for reference when i have my own students.

It's a Bug's Life (Week 2)

In today's lecture we looked at texture and used multi mediums in order to create a personalized bug/ creature. When I first began to create my bug I found it hard to piece my shapes together and create a body that I liked. I really enjoyed experimenting with the crayons and textures and seeing what would be produced. At first I was not too happy with my bug, however once I added some smaller details such as eyes, legs, antennae, and gems it started to come to life and look more like a bug.

This art lesson reminded me of a box of textures that I created for my kindergarten placement. I found different textures such as felt, tissue paper, foam, pom poms, cork, cotton balls, paper, cardstock, and fake grass and I put them all in a box to create a sensory box. They really loved it and I also stuck little animals in the box so that it was like a game where they had to find the animals in their “habitats.”

Use Your Imagination (Week 1)

Today I learned about the importance of allowing our students to be creative and forming works of art that have meaning to them. I learned this through the bunny creation instructions and how everything was very planned out precisely in the first lesson. It was interesting to see that we were all itching to change things on our bunnies as we were not happy with the eyes or we felt that the whiskers were too big. I really like how the lesson was transformed into a free and curious process, where we experimented with different materials and let our imaginations run wild.

I learned that art does not need to have complete structure and we must let our students explore in order to experiment and inquire about what they are making. Art is sort of like building your own story through materials that are around you. In terms of my piece of art, I stuck to the original idea of making a bunny mask for Easter. However, I added pipe cleaners, stickers, jewels, paper clay, googley eyes, and eyelashes to make my bunny more original and unique. I wanted my bunny to be cute and fun. I really liked to see how everyone took different perspectives to their bunnies and created unique masks. They all look wonderful together up on the wall and it is interesting to compare how different people used the same materials for different parts of their masks.