PItt State High School Art Day

On April 10th I took a group of 9 students over to Pitt State for High School Art Day. We did a couple of warm up activities, making a story from Pictionary drawings, and then we got started on one of the two big projects for the day.  The topic for the day was circus themed because of the work by Ariel Bowman that was currently in the gallery at PSU.  I did a little post on her work earlier that you can find here and I strongly encourage you to look up Ariel Bowman’s work.  

Ariel Bowman

The group was tasked with making a cardboard sculpture related to the circus.  We were told about the competition and the topic ahead of time so we already had in mind what we were going to do.  It helped a ton that some of my students had already seen the exhibition on a previous trip.  We came up with the idea of an elephant on a stand.  

I was a little nervous at the midway point that they were not going to have enough time to pull it together.  We only had an hour and a half.  Interestingly, we were one of two groups that actually used the cardboard as the main focus of the sculpture.  I guess a lot of other schools brought in a lot of extras to add to the sculpture and really only used the cardboard as a structure.  

Humphrey

My older students did a great job of taking control and tasking the other members with jobs.  They worked really hard at each of their given jobs which was pretty tough considering that all these different parts had to match up and come together as one sculpture in the end.  

After the sculptures we went to lunch.  Coming back their challenge was to draw one of the other students in our group as a circus performer.  The students were given pictures of old vintage circus posters as inspiration.  We were given about an hour and a half to do this drawing.  

Morgan Chilcott - Senior - Art IV

Holly Black - Junior - Art III

Here are a few examples of the kids drawings when we were done.  Not bad for an hour and half worth of work in my opinion.  I brought students from all different levels of art classes which I worried would intimidate my Art I students.  They stuck it out and performed greatly though.  

Michael Shinkle's drawing of me - Freshman - Art I

Peyton Hearn - Junior - Art III

Alyssa Troy - Senior - Art IV

Great day with a lot of fun.  It is always great to go back and see my old faculty at PSU.

8th Grade Drawing Improvement

Alya Whitaker

The past few weeks I have had several classes working on different assignments where they complete a pre-assessment drawing at the beginning of the unit and another, post assessment drawing, at the end.  I hold onto the first drawing during the whole process.  Typically the students are very shocked to see how much they improved.  As I pull out the pre-assessment drawing most of the kids are making comments along the lines of “Like, I totally bet I didn’t improve, like, at all” (I imagine most of my students saying that like a Kardashian).  

Makayla May

Aly Potter

First up is 8th Grade Art.  At the beginning of the semester I make the 8th Grade do a plant drawing just to assess where their drawing ability is.  Nine weeks later I then have them do another one just so they can see how much they have grown in ability.  I have yet to have a student, who did the assignment with effort, not improve over the nine weeks.  

Bree Reynolds

Jadin Reese

Probably my favorite part of seeing the before and afters is the fact that they they actually draw the plant the second time.  I think during the first round a lot of the students think the stool or pot is easier so they focus on that instead of the plant.

Aiden Cox

Maddy Tomlinson

Also another big improvement, that almost everyone does, is to utilize their space better.  You see a lot of kids with little drawings that only take up about one tenth of their paper.  I could have given them a Post-It note and there would have probably still been too much space around the edges.  Now however most of them are real good about running the drawing off the edge of the picture plane and creating some nice negative shapes.  

Mayson Cole

Hailey Dougherty 

Honors Society Heads to an Artist Lecture

Art Honors Society recently took a trip up to Pittsburg State University to listen to a lecture by Ariel Bowman about her work being exhibited in the Art Departments Gallery.  Very well done lecture.  I really loved watching the evolution, pun intended, of her work and how it all becomes interrelated.  We spent about an hour listening to her lecture on her work and her influences.  Combining the theme of a circus, something that is disappearing from our culture, with these prehistoric creatures that are already past creates a powerful image.  Personally, I love the muted palette of colors and the textures of these creatures.  Many of the circus features look as if these beasts have been wearing these garments since the time they would have existed. 

Borrowed from www.arielbowman.com

Each creature has so much detail and texture that you can’t help but feel the weight these massive animals would have had.  The beasts have incredible detail and little rewards for those people that take the time to inspect sculptures in detail.  She has an amazing ability to bring these brutes to life with her ceramics.  

She uses steel pipes, used for plumbing, as an understructure during the building process.  She says she prefers solid building these and then carving out the middle before firing.  Not being a 3D person myself it would be better to ask her yourself at www.arielbowman.com for a more detailed process of how she makes these.

Ariel was very receptive to questions and interaction.  Which is great because one of our NAHS students was very curious about the work.  There was a great back and forth between Holly and Ariel about her artwork.  This is exactly what I want to see when I bring these students to these kind of events.  Ariel even encouraged Holly to contact her through Facebook or email and seemed very approachable if Holly had any questions in the future.  

Ariel and Holly talking the talk