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Why You Should Consider Putting on a Faculty Art Show
My district’s art department just successfully completed its third annual faculty art show. This event is simultaneously the most stressful and most deeply rewarding commitment of my school year. Here...
View ArticleBeyond the Banana: 10 Ideas for Still Life Compositions
Whether you’re drawing or painting, composition counts just as much as execution. And, while fruit is delicious and nutritious, let’s face it, it’s a little played out on the still life scene. Below...
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Know Your Place
As adults, we re-evaluate our personal identity continually. Over the years, I’ve understood myself in many different roles—teacher, wife, mother, artist, etc. On a societal level, we identify with...
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Found-Object Pillars
Visiting schools as a guest artist has led me to consider students as apprentices on group projects. We work as a team through a problem toward an unknown. During the course of the project,...
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Student Artist Spotlight: Jonell Aban
Created using Prismacolor colored pencils, this stunning piece by student artist Jonell Aban is aptly named Solitudinem. With precision shading and an exquisite palette, Jonell perfectly captures the...
View ArticleWhimsical Caterpillar: Art Lesson Plan
Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar isn’t too far from the truth. Caterpillars, the larva of moths and butterflies, emerge from their eggs starving, and stuff themselves as full as they can...
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Sgraffito 101
Derived from the Italian word for “scratch”, Sgraffito is the process of scratching or scraping one layer to reveal another layer, usually of contrasting color, beneath. It’s an effective way to add...
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Toy Stories
I teach digital photography at a high school in San Diego and am always looking for new ways of teaching about depth of field—the amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear...
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8 Everyday Items You Need in Your Art Room
Art teachers gain the reputation of having some of the most unique classrooms around. Primarily because of the things we have in them. When someone asks if we need 100 (insert obscure objects here) we...
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Tried & True Tips – June 2017
We did it! It’s June and we made it through another year of new faces, old faces, ups, downs, crayons, paint, glue, and clay. Now it’s time to wrap it all up, clean up your room, take inventory of what...
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Fanciful Fish: Art Lesson Plan
From Hawaii and Mexico to Indonesia, Ecuador, Australia, and countless other exotic locations, millions of snorkelers and SCUBA divers take the plunge every year, in hopes of spotting some of the...
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5 Steps to Opening a Successful Painting Center
Opening a painting center in the art room sounds like an overwhelming challenge. With many art teachers switching to a more choice-based approach, people are looking for answers. Whether you’re looking...
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Typography 101
Often confused with font, which is simply the collection of a certain set of typographical characters at a specific size and weight, typography is an art unto itself. This art involves not just the...
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Installing Happiness
In today’s world, students are exposed to negativity around every corner. Watching the news can easily put someone in a state of anxiety or depression. Our students are feeling the weight of the world...
View ArticleDrawing the Light: Art Lesson Plan
Do you really see what you think you see? The mind has an amazing capacity to “fill in the blanks” – to see what isn’t actually there. This ability helps us read words with missing letters and see the...
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Painting with Light 101
Artists including Etienne-Jles Marey, Georges Demeny, Frank Gilbreth, and Man Ray have been “painting” with light since 1889. Even Picasso took to this bright new technique, creating a series of “light...
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Animal Options – A Year in Review
The third-graders had only three class periods remaining for the year—a mere two and a half hours. My challenge was to present a project that would allow for a review of a large number of the terms and...
View ArticleHomage to the Square: Art Lesson Plan
Op Art That Pops! As a professor at Yale, Josef Albers, founder of the Op Art movement, began the 1000+ piece study he titled Homage to the Square. A graduate and former Bauhaus teacher, Albers’ study...
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A One-Day Clay Project Easy Enough to Do From a Cart
If you only see your students once a week, preserving clay projects between classes can present some major challenges. If you’re in this situation, you may want to consider planning a few one-day clay...
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Redefining the Microlabs
It’s tough. I get it. Once you have something that works, why change it? It was this attitude that left me creatively bankrupt as a teacher. I found that after twenty years of teaching, I had...
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