Neodesha High School Visual Arts: 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.