Using Templates to Support in Visual Art - AS91914

 When you are starting a new page in a sketchbook, there is nothing worse than sitting looking at a blank piece of paper. 

To help with this, I made the students some templates on paper to work on their two artist models. I photocopied the templates onto wet strength cartridge paper we i knew we were going to be painting and printing and doing collage work as part of the media experiments.

This is the template for the Henri Rousseau work - link to document

Here is the student work produced from using this template. The students cut out the media experiments and presented them into their sketchbooks.

This is the Margaret Aull template that we used. I put instructions for different media to be used on this one. Link to the document

Here is the student work produced from using this template. The students cut out the media experiments and presented them into their sketchbooks.

We are now onto thinking about our own work and we are using the work from AS91912 - link to blog post. and the influence of one of the artist models that we have looked at.

 I do not want the students to be put off by suddenly having a big blank piece of paper staring at them so I have made a template for them for this step too - link to document

This presentation is from my sketchbook and shows how we can cut up this template to arrange into our sketchbooks the same as before. I am really enjoying seeing how individual the students are making their sketchbooks with how they are laying them out. I am looking forward to seeing their ideas about their own piece of work and reading their notes about what their ideas are about.

Year 11 Visual Art First Standard

 We are now working on the second standard in Year 11 Visual Art and there has been a recent final flurry of activity to get the first standard done so the grades can be included on the reports which are due at the end of this week. There is nothing like the looming knowledge of parents / care givers knowing how you have been doing to inspire a bit of work completion. 

This standard was AS91912 - Link to the class site and planning here.

Careers Expo - Art Gallery

 We had our annual careers expo this week, and we decided that the Visual Art and DVC department would put on an art gallery style exhibition of student work as a practice run for our big art exhibition next term.

We had been thinking about how to display the sculpture work for a while. This is the first time Tamaki College has done sculpture at NCEA so we had no prior way of displaying it and we really wanted each piece of student work to have its own plinth. We then had the idea of using concrete building blocks to build our own plinths that can be assembled and disassembled as we need them. Also, they can be built to the height we need.

So we found an Auckland company that could supply and deliver a pallet load of the blocks we needed and my senior class then got the job of moving them off the pallet into the back of the garage. With a piece of plywood as the top, the practice plinth came out looking just how we wanted it.

Our head of careers who was organising the whole event got hold of a load of old political campaign board. These are really big and plain white on the back. She told us to come and take what we wanted. As we wanted to display a lot of the students drawings and artwork, just relying on the wall behind where we were going to be in the sports hall was not going to be enough. We had the idea of taping up three of the boards to make a large free standing triangular structure. This could then be stood anywhere and have loads of space for 2D artwork. White gaffer tape which did the job on the corners really well and they stood up securely.

It was a big job in the days running up to the day, as we had a lot of photographing of student work to do and we then printed it out A3 sized. We used the same burgundy border around everything to link it all together. We made a shared Google presentation to do this and made the page size A3 so there would be no pixelating.

Link to presentation

We printed a couple of posters and one of the Year 12 students sculpture photographs onto A1 so they made an impact on the boards.

It was my lovely senior class on the day of the expo who got the job of moving all the blocks and boards.

We then set everything up. We had been given the area in front of the doors so the gallery was the first thing people saw as they were entering the expo. We took advantage of this and went either side of the door so people had to actually walk through the gallery to enter.

We got lots of good feedback on the night, gave out lots of flyers and hopefully inspired some students to choose Visual Art or DVC next year.

Planning for Visual Art AS91914

 My Year 11 Visual Art students have worked through their first internal standard and are now onto working on the external they are entered into, AS91914 - Explore Visual Arts processes and conventions to inform own art making.

We have been enjoying the experimental aspects of this standard. The first thing that we did was to try out the new gel plates  - link to blog post here.

We then started looking at the first of the two artist models we are using this year, Henri Rousseau. I am using this as a way to experiments with different media with the students. They have not had much experience of different art media so I made a worksheet where they looked at Rousseau's work and used a selection of different media to copy sections of it.

Link to document

The students have been doing some reading about Henri Rousseau - Link to blog post here , and they had to use this information to answer a series of questions and add this information into their sketchbook presentation. Here is the link to class site page with the Rousseau information, instructions and questions.

As usual, I always do an example alongside the students. Here is my sketchbook page so I can show them what I want them to do. We are only using 1 page for this work as we can only use 8 pages for this standard as a whole. I wanted them to. cut up the worksheet and present the Rousseau information and media experiments in a visually attractive way.

Next week, we have out Careers expo, so I have been photographing the student work to make an exhibition for visitors to the expo to look at. For part of that, I have made two posters of the student's Rousseau work. One of all the tigers that they drew and one of the different media that they have used. I have made these posters A1 sized so they look really good and you can see the student work clearly.

Link to media document

Link to Tigers document

Our next step is to go through tis same process with out end art ist model, Margaret Aull - link to site page

The students will then use the information collected from the first standard - link to site page - with the style of one the the artist models and produce a piece of work of their own design.

Reading for Identification in DVC

 My Year 11 DVC class are currently starting their seating designs. They have already looked at their design influence (the has to look at either Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright or Antoni Gaudi - Link to planning here ). They now have to think about their second design influence, which has to be Māori inspired. We looked at Matariki as a starting point for this influence and I gave them this presentation to start them off on their research.

After they had done their general reading, they had to decide on one star in the Matariki cluster and find the story of that star / character. This story was to be copied and pasted onto a Google doc and then they had to read it and highlight where something was mentioned that they could then find as an image.

They then had to find images to go with the story and put it all on the same doc ready for printing.

This is my example.

After their document was printed out, the students had to cut everything out and arrange it on a page in the sketchbooks.

We kept the highlighted areas on the written sections as it made clear the parts of the story that they were focusing on.

From here, the students have been drawing the images from their research. I think that drawing the images and not just using them to look at for inspiration, gives a greater insight into the shapes and forms as you are making stronger connections in the brain by physically working with them.

What we are on with now is design development. The students have their initial sketches based on the design elements of their chosen designer. They now have to take those initial ideas and use the drawings from their Matariki stories to inspire how the development goes.

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

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.