Mono Printing with Gel Plates

 I have been watching videos on how to use gel plates for printing for a while now and I have bought myself some gel plates to play with at home. I have been enjoying my experiments and wanted my Year 11 Visual Art class to use this skill / technique on their work this year.

I have set up some videos for the class to watch on the class website - link here

I showed them a couple of techniques at the beginning of the week and we had a go.

These are some photos of the students from this first session.

Here are some of their prints from this first session - link to presentation here

We then watched some of the videos in the class and I sent them to them to watch at home.

At the beginning of the next lesson, we went for a quick trip down the creek to collect things that we can press into the gel plates.

I also had a go at cutting some texture mats out on the laser cutter for the students to use. We tried them in thin card to start with but they fell apart while we used them. Cutting them out of EVA foam sheet worked really well.

Here are some photographs of the work from this second session - link to presentation here

Staff CoL Presentation

 The Tamaki College CoL teachers presented their work to the whole staff this morning to show where we are up to in the inquiry process.

Here is my section - link to document (presenter notes are included)

Here is the whole group's presentation - link to document

Artist Model - Margaret Aull

The Year 11 Visual Art class are doing focussed work on their first artist model. A New Zealand artist called Margaret Aull. Link to the class site. 

Link to Visual Art on Instagram

They have been doing copies of her work, where their focus was on mixing the paint colours to match as we only have primary colours and black and white so they have to mix all their own colours.

They then had to come up with a piece of work of their own which shows it was inspired by how Margaret Aull works.

Here are my examples. I do these alongside them so we all work on it together. Link to document

Here are some of the students copies of Margaret Aull work. Link to document




Here are some of their own work that has been inspired by Margaret Aull. Link to document

Design Drawing Warm Ups

 My senior Design and Visual Communication classes are at the point where they are doing concept ideas. These ideas have to be based on either the designer or the design era that they have been researching.

They come into the class either from mentoring first thing on a morning or from another class or from interval, so their heads are full of whatever has been going on beforehand. They can not be expected to sit down and just start thinking of design ideas. The students find it frustrating and unmanageable. I also talk to them about the power a blank piece of paper has on your mind when you stare at it for too long. They think I am crazy when we talk about this, but staring at a blank page for too long, trying to think of ideas, makes your mind blanker and blanker and makes it even more difficult to produce design ideas.

The first thing we have done for warm ups this week has been "30 seconds / 5 things". This is where I time them for 30 seconds and give them 5 things they have to draw in the time. For example, 5 things that start with the letter "T", 5 things that live in the sea, 5 things you wear on your head etc. They start off worrying about their drawing and maybe coming up with 2 things in the time. By the time we are on our 5th or 6th thing, they are drawing like crazy and not caring what it looks like. This gets them smiling, laughing at each others really rough drawings and settling into the lesson.

Our next activity was to draw a big scribble on an A4 piece of paper with their eyes closed. They then swapped scribbles with someone else.  They then had to look at the scribble and try and pick out a figure out of it - looking for heads, bodies, arms, legs etc. I talked to them about the human ability to see faces and figures in any random pattern we see.

Here is my example that I did on the board to show them what I meant.

We then moved to using these techniques in a way that will help our design ideas.

They drew straight line scribbles on one page and wavy line scribbles on another page. They then had swap with someone else and look to see shapes that could help their design work. Year 11 had to look for seating and Year 12 had to look for lighting. They could ignore their architect or design era inspirations at this point as I didn't want it to complicate matters for them.

They then took these onto a drawing sheet where they started to make them look more like a design for a seat or lighting. 

Here are my example that I did on the board and the start of the development onto paper of some of the designs.

Year 12 Lighting

Year 11 Seating

Here is some of the Year 12 lighting work form today.

I was really pleased with how they reacted to this new way of working and they all had designs started by the end of the lesson, which is not normal for when we start concept ideas.