Good quote for teachers

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inkscape tutorial: Elements

Inkscape tutorial: Elements & Principles

This tutorial will demonstrate the elements and principles of design which are normally taught to early art students in order to understand various properties used in art making. This is not an exhaustive list, so please add, subtract, and combine to make this tutorial more comprehensive.

Digital Learners

I know, I fail at this too. It's easy enough to use ourselves, but how do we harness it to teach? And I know, if we stopped blocking all these sites, how could we keep all the viruses off our servers and how could we keep the kids from texting and instant messaging all the time, dirty stuff, naughty stuffy, mean stuff, gossip, bullying etc. etc?

I don't knw. But I know we need to do better.

Difference between conceptual & perceptual

I don't usually like seeing pictures of myself, but I caught a yearbook staffer trying to shoot me during 7th Grade Art and it occurred to me that I may as well be using this blog as part of my teaching portfolio that the State requires. Also a chance to share some stuff with elementary teachers for their professional development and to reinforce stuff that high school drawing students are learning.

To introduce junior high students to the element of design, line and to drawing, we talked about how to accurately draw what you see in real life, you have to overcome the prior knowledge you already have of the subject matter. In other words, to avoid making mistakes, you have to avoid letting your fast working, logical brain from superimposing concepts about things and using over-simplified "clip art."
For example. Our brains "know" that a stool has a circle for a top, and four legs that are all the same length and all on a flat level. Ah, but knowing is not seeing. What we see, is an elliptical top that is way to narrow to ever sit on, and each of the legs is a different length and even a different width. Kids often make mistakes in drawing because they "know" too much about what they are looking at, resulting in distorted perspectives and overly simplified images. Ironically, Cubists like Picasso drew that way on purpose, because they were visually analyzing and abstracting the basic concepts and geometric shapes of things from multiple perspectives simultaneously.

Is this getting a little deep? Maybe the next picture will make more sense.

We "know" that adult humans have 32 teeth. But if you draw a smile with exactly 32 teeth in it, it's going to look ridiculous, because even Jack Nicholson as the Joker in the Batman movie doesn't have a broad enough jaw to show all 32 teeth! Gums and lips and tongue and the natural curve (the "arch" as dentists call it) all conspire to hide most of them. The best way to draw teeth is not to. by focusing on the negative-space around the teeth and the shared edge between the teeth and the darkness of the inside of your mouth, you're much more likely to record accurate perceptions where the size and placement relationships are more correct.

One of the best websites I've found for Elementary Teachers who looking for ideas

The ArtsConnectEd Web site (www.artsconnected.org) puts you and your students in touch with images, information, and educational resources from the Walker Art Center and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
They'll suggest ways to make ArtsConnectEd a part of fun, student-centered learning.

Their "Tool Kit" is a great way to start learning about the elements and principles of design.
Artists use visual elements and principles like line, color and shape as tools to build works of art. Each title has three sections:

• Watch an animated demonstration
  
• Find examples of the concept in works of art from museums
  
• Create your own composition

Visit their Art tool kit at
http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/explore.cfm

Middle School Art; Anstract

Here is an old example by a student a few years ago of the assignment that 7th graders had to work on today. First, they had to find a photograph in a magazine then they had to draw it in 4 steps-

1. As realistically as they can manage
2. In a somewhat abstract manor; simplified and stylized
3. Finally as abstracted as possible- to the point that it appears to be non-objective.

Book Review; Slaughterhouse Five

Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Kurt Vonnegut

One of America's most prolific 20th century authors, Kurt Vonnegut was also a WWII POW. He and about a hundred other American soldiers were being used as forced labor in a German meat processing plant when the city they were in was bombed by the allies. For some reason, the shelter they were in under the hog confinement was spared. They were the only people to survive the Bombing of Dresden in 1945. 135,000 people were killed as a result of this air attack using conventional weapons. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan only killed 71,379.

Slaughterhouse 5 was published in 1969 at the height of American involvement in Vietnam and is often considered a powerful antiwar book, along the likes of Josef Heller's "Catch 22" and Richard Hooker's "M*A*S*H."

Slaughterhouse 5 follows a character Vonnegut invented, who was one of the hundred Americans who survived Dresden along with him. "Billy Pilgrim" is a Forrest Gump sort of character. Billy is an under trained, unarmed chaplain's assistant sent over during the Battle of the Bulge, caught behind German lines, first sent to a concentration camp in a prisoner train, then to the meat processing plant in Dresden. That would be enough to give anyone Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but twenty years later he is the only person to survive a plane crash on his way to an optometry convention. Billy sustains a major head injury in the crash. Somewhere between WWII and the sixties suburbs Billy believes he is abducted by aliens and "un-stuck" from time.

As a result, the book follows Billy Pilgrim as he jumps from memory to memory in the war, the prison camp, and various other misadventures back home. You can imagine homeless Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD and having LSD flashbacks, but Billy is a clean-cut, conventional, soft spoken, upstanding member of the Rotary club.

If you're a science fiction fan, you'll probably love this. If you're opposed to the war, you'll probably find plenty of reason to like it. If you're just interested in a classic and influential work of American literature, Vonnegut makes you care about Billy and the people around him to stick with the abrupt changes in settings and time. He also makes you relate to the other characters around Billy- even the Germans, even the alien abductors, so you can relate to everything that's going on even when it's either tragic or surreal. We've all met people like Billy's wife, the soldier who saves his life, the English officers, and General "Wild" Bob.

TV Journalist Linda Elerbee has had a tag-line that she uses at the end of her reports for at least the last thirty years, turns out she may have copied it from Vonnegut. I never know what it meant until I read this book, it's actually a pretty sad and somber sentiment, "and so it goes."

This is a fast, funny, easy read that really makes you think. It is black humor, but it is a lot lighter than say "Night" by Elie Wiesel, but it certainly makes you think and even if it doesn't turn you into a pacifist, it will probably make you at least a little more empathetic to people around you. I hope.

And if you're ever in Cody Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!"

Click here to read more of my book reviews: http://tmal.multiply.com/reviews

Yearbook; Elements of Design » graphic:DESIGN:basics

I was looking for things to help Yearbook students with graphic design and layouts when I stumbled on this site that I think could be useful to Yearbook staffers, Web Design students, and probably elementary teachers too, and really anybody who's interested in learning more about art or design!

If you're really into graphic design, the author of this site is a designer herself and textbook author who offers graphic design basics, competitions, news, interviews, book reviews, and more.

Elements of Design » graphic:DESIGN:basics

Elements of Design

These are the ingredients to any design project, whether it’s a way to set up your garden to a map that shows people who to go from here to the moon. The ingredients, like those within a cake, often interact with each other to the point that the cake wouldn’t exist if one of these elements were missing.

Principles of Design

These are the tools that blend the ingredients for any design project. You can use all the design elements, but if you don’t blend them with rhythm, balance, contrast, etc., then you don’t have a cake.

Basic Art & Drawing: Lessons

COOL School; Online Drawing Lessons

This is an awesome site I found from the Oregon school system. If you want to learn about the elements of design or about drawing, this is a quick, easy fun website with simple, "independent-study" exercises you can do on your own.

Audience

Middle School to Adult

Goals

• Analyze art work using elements and principles.
• Opportunity to meet/exceed Art CIM standards.
• Expose students to a variety of drawing techniques and styles.
• Recognize, know meaning, and demonstrate art principles and elements in student's own art work.
• Students will critique their own art work and that of others, using elements and principles.
• Students will recognize and demonstrate the following: contour line, stippling, shading, crosshatching, gridding, 1-point and 2-point perspective, portraits, and proportions.

PaperBackSwap

Looking for a good book, but you can't find it at Wal-Mart and you don't have the time or the ride to get to a Borders or Barnes and Noble's in Omaha or Sioux City? Don't have the credit card for looking online? Feel like you've seen everything you're interested in at your local library?

May I suggest you check out PaperBackSwap? All you have to do is offer to send other people your used books, and then you get to choose from some of theirs! Cheap, easy, actually kind of fun.

PaperBackSwap is a group of readers who share books with each other (NOT just paperbacks) for nothing more than the cost of postage! You can learn more about this exciting site by flipping through their PaperBackSwap book.

http://www.paperbackswap.com

Potent Quote

"You don't have to
burn books
to destroy a culture.
Just get people to
stop reading them."

~Ray Bradbury
(Author; Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles)

Drawing

Writing/Reflection for our first major drawing- a modified contour drawing of your hand.

First, students were asked to score themselves on a scale of 0-4 (4 being highest) on each of the five perceptual skills needed for drawing, as well as how much better they think their drawings have been getting.

• Perception of Edges
• Perception of Spaces (composition)
  
• Perception of Relationships (proportions)
• Perception of Values (shading)
• Gestalt (Wholeness, One-ness, finished-ness)
• Improvement

Then the students were asked a number of short-answer questions. The first three pertained to the process of creating the artwork. The second four have to do with the finished product, the drawing itself, using the 4 steps in Art Criticism.

1. Did you lose tack of time?
2. Did the drawing at some point become interesting to you? (Captivating/Intriguing?)
3. Did you experience any distraction from your (left hemisphere) verbal mode? If so, how did you escape it?
   
   
4. In 10 words or less, simply describe your drawing. (This question focuses on the Sensory Elements of Design; line, shape, space, shading, etc. Description is pretty low on Bloom's Taxonomy of critical thinking skills.)
5. What about your drawing will capture and maintain a viewer's attention? (This questions forces them to analyze their artwork, analysis is a little higher up Bloom's Taxonomy, and this pushes them into considering the Formal Principles of Design)
6. What does you drawing make you think of? What do you think it will make viewers think of? How do you think viewers will feel if they look at it for a long time? What is the mood of your drawing? What would you title your work? Write a poem to accompany your work. (this series of questions have the students interpreting their own work, another step up the taxonomy, this one more imaginative and reflective, but more subjective.)
7. What grade do you believe you deserve on this assignment and why? (This question involves using judgment/self-assessment, but forces them to articulate their reasoning. They already have criteria with the 0-4 rating system that they started with.)
   

DEAR Time

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
~Confucius

Elementary Art Resourses

Okay, Colleagues of the short people,

Here are a whole slew of websites and elementary art lesson plans on the web. See, not being a qualified Elementary Educator myself, I'd probably come up short if I tried to write your lessons for you. Besides, if I gave you all of my fun, short lessons on the elements of design, what would I have left to teach Seventh graders?

I will be sure to send more resources your way as I discover them through out this year. Good luck!

Some Specific Lesson Plans

• Incredible Art Department - this is from Princeton University
  
• The Worldwide Art Gallery
• Prairie Visions - they have summer workshops for teachers in Nebraska
  
• Artsonia Kids Art Museum - The Largest Student Art Gallery on the Web! I liked this one, hopefully you'll enjoy it more than KinderArt
  
• KinderArt - Art Lessons - Art Education: The largest collection of free art lessons and art education information on the Internet.
• Preschool arts and crafts
• A. Pintura: Art Detective -This is really kind of fun, I assume you remember Carmen San Diego? It's like that only his name is like Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.
  
• Living Colour
• The Art Teacher Connection Home Page
• Search Lesson Plans (Education at the Getty)
• Crayola® Creativity Central - Lesson Plans
• A Lifetime of Color - (from Sharpie Markers)
• Inside Art: An Art History Game
• Art Resources in Teaching
• Drawing in One-Point Perspective
• MoMA | online projects | Art Safari
• National Gallery of Art | NGAkids home page
• Color Matters

Some Specific Lesson Plans

• A Lesson Plan for Why the Mona Lisa is Smiling
• Art and Technology--for those would want to use technology in art education Art - Math -Science Connections
• Art Strand Lessons
• AskERIC - Art Activities
• Carolyn Roberts--computer art lesson plans using MS Paint
• Christmas Stockings/ Spiders / Skeletons Lessons
• Computer Art--more computer art lesson plans using MS Paint
• Drawing Lessons
• Great Art Lessons
• Judy Decker's Incredible Art Resources
• LessonPlansPage.com--Art Education resources
• McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) The Arts Lesson Plans and Activities
• Painting Lessons

Teachers; Art basics for non-art teachers

Here is the PowerPoint Show for the presentation I made today for the Boyer Valley Elementary Teachers in Dow City

http://boyer-valley.k12.ia.us/artbasics.pps

And here is a PDF of the National Standards for Art
http://boyer-valley.k12.ia.us/artstandards.pdf