Passing Time: Pen Sketches

Here are a few of the sketches I have done in my spare time while teaching/subbing. Every now and then I get a free period or I have time to kill waiting for a class to come in, so I spend the time drawing. It is very relaxing. It is also fun to share sketches with students sometimes, they are a good conversation starter! Once I was setting up and practicing with a document projector while students where working. It caught the attention of a few kids and they started asking for requests and I drew a few of their portraits. They really loved it and liked getting to see the drawing process on the screen. I wound up giving them the portrait drawings, too.

Anyway back to the sketches, using pen is challenging and fun. Working with a pen forces you to make decisions and work with unintended marks and lines, instead of erasing them. You have to commit to working through any problems or just let it go. I really enjoyed using pen for shading because of the contrast it provides. I worked on these on and off for a several weeks, whenever I had a few minutes with nothing much to do.

Enjoy!

Bison

Draped Man

Puppy

Sink Knob

Ceramic Vase

Blue Bird

Yin-Yang Creature

Art On Wheels

I was very fortunate to have a new teaching opportunity over the past year. It was working with a company called Art on Wheels. They are awesome!!! Basically they bring art classes to various groups in Virginia. These groups can be for children or adults at schools, churches, community centers, hospitals, local events, etc. The teacher brings all the supplies to the location, so all participants have to do is come in. I have been teaching a few regular art classes with the company over the Fall and on into this year. If you would like to learn more about Art on Wheels, visit their website at http://www.artonwheels-va.org/ .

I have two new classes this year, teaching creative painting to adults at the Cancer Institute at Reynolds Crossing and the St. Francis Cancer Institute. I will post more from them throughout the year.

Two of my Fall classes have been geared toward teaching adults with disabilities; one class at a local church and one at a historical location called the Walkerton Tavern. (Beautiful building if you get the chance to visit. It used to be a field hospital during the Civil War.) These classes tend to have between about 6-13 participants, so that allows for more one on one time. I love this because it gives me a chance to get to know the participants and help them with different aspects of projects as needed.

So far, we have done tissue paper collage, plaster casting, clay bowls, and marionettes.  

Here are a few photos from some of the Fall classes, the project was creating a tissue paper collage of a river scene over two class meetings. It was fun to see their different approaches. I had a few people who would take their time and tear their paper deliberately into smaller pieces and plan their landscape out. I also had a few who were more interested in the collage process and went more abstract with their designs. I had participants make a collage of their choice if they finished early, and had time for another piece. (It is always best to have a few back up lessons handy in case you have some fast workers. I started carrying paper and colored pencils as an additional back up.) The participants were really excited to work on one of their choice at the end because they could involve their interests. I had one student who wanted to make Ninja Turtles, so I brought in a reference and showed him how to draw the characters. Another student mentioned wanting to make a Whammy character from an 80's game show called Press Your Luck. She got so excited when I told her she could and I would help her to make the character! I pulled up a video and pic of the character and we used that as a reference. Several other students wanted to do Halloween pictures for theirs. Theses classes were a lot of fun to teach and everyone really enjoyed them!

 In some of the pictures you might see some aids (church class) or volunteers (Tavern class). These lovely ladies are all absolutely wonderful!! They clearly love working with the participants and really enjoy what they do. They were a big help during these classes!

Church Class:

 

Walkerton Tavern Class:

Animal Twists - Photoshop Lesson for Art I

Time for another update!  (This will be a long one.)

This lesson is another favorite from my Student Teaching days, this time at Hermitage High School (Go Panthers!). The idea was to create animal hybrids using Photoshop. These hybrids were to be convincingly merged to make the animal believable. Students had to combine at least 2 animals and add in two textures, so they were blending a minimum of 4 photos. I aimed it at Art I students, who are generally all in the 9th grade. I also had the opportunity to teach this lesson to 8th grade level Art I students, while I was board subbing at Tuckahoe Middle School.

Demo Model : Bear-Frog made with bear, frog, turtle, moss, and dirt photographs

I had several goals for the lesson. The first, was to give students a basic understanding of Photoshop and photo-manipulation. I wanted students to understand that Photoshop could be used as a tool to make unique pieces of art.  Some of the big topics we covered along the way included: using royalty free images vs. copyrighted images, photo-manipulation vs. photo-merge, raster vs. vector based programs, and resolution and its relation to image size. In addition to those main topics, there were specific aspects and tools in the Photoshop program that were necessary to learn including opacity, layers, the clone stamp tool, selection tools, hue/saturation, eraser, blur, burn, dodge, and move tools. 

A note on copyright in regards to this project, it is a biggie! Students were required to use either photos they had taken themselves or royalty free photos (photos that did not need to be paid for). Most websites with royalty free photos only required the user to give credit to the source to use the image (I checked the usage policies on several sites and gave students an approved list of websites they could use). To meet this requirement, students had to fill out a citation list and turn it in with their final project. Copyrighted images were NOT allowed, as that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism. This was a learning experience for many students. Several wanted to use images from movies or comic characters and I actually walked them through how to check if an image was copyrighted, by checking for watermarks and copyright info at the bottom of web pages. As a general rule all movie, art, and comic images were a no-go because they all were sure to be copyrighted. I also had to make sure they clicked and went to the original webpage to cite their source, a ton of students tried to put Google.com or Google Images as their source.

Needless to say, there was a lot to cover and this was a multi-week lesson. It was a process of taking what they learned the previous class and building on it as we went, so all the information was spread out over the classes and easy for students to absorb.

I created step-by-step tutorial handouts for students to reference while they worked (complete with screenshots) and I did several demonstrations. The first demo, was just showing how the tools worked and students had a Practice Assignment to basically try out the tools. After that, I gave a demo on how to merge animals and textures (See Bear-Frog above^^). I  made the photos I was using available for them to follow along with me. Two things to note with Photoshop whether you are teaching it or using it yourself: the best way to learn it is to use it hands-on (not just read or listen about it) and there are many different ways to do the same operation or effect (like using menus or hot keys, etc.).

Here are some student examples!

1st Post! Welcome to Kelly Nixon: Art Education

It is finally time to launch a blog dedicated to my love of Art Education! Here you will find a collection of my various lessons, ideas, and musings on Art Ed. I will be adding a lot of content over the next few days as I go through lessons from my teaching experiences. 

I have a list of links to my art oriented sites to the right if you would like to check out some of my personal artwork.

Check back often and enjoy!