Title: art teacher - student

Gender: Male

Age: Ageless

Sun Sign: Cancer

Chinese Sign: Water Dog

Location: Denver, CO

  
              It is my mission in life as an aspiring art teacher (I'll be graduating in two years) and youth mentor to encourage and support artistic and personal growth in my students.  My future classroom will be a place where kids are helped along in creating positive and life sharing artwork.  I'll encourage their participation in thinking, speaking, and acting non-violently with a system for rewarding good behavior,  improvements in attitude and craft.

           I've created a comprehensive art class curriculum that tends to the most basic aspects of non-violence while teaching my young students the fundamentals of clay hand building, drawing, developing narrative structure, writing poetry, and centering themselves along with the basic elements of art and design. 
            The students assignments will be an integration of daily morning breathing, stretching, and hand and eye exercises.  This morning wakeup will be paired with 10 minutes of observational writing/poetry to get students to think about their lives and translate that into writing that they will incorporate with a final project - a combination of written word and visual arts media in either sculptural or 2d drawing/ painting.
  
            My students will get a strong feel of the kind of observation and critical thinking that goes through making a work of art and living the art of kindness.  They will learn how to keep track of the processes behind art construction and will maintain a journal of processes and techniques along with my hand drawn textbook on drawing techniques.

              

And NOW

The Developing Curriculum and The Assignments!


     First Month:   Create your own cultural mandala with color pencils and pastels - students will find objects from their household and pictures of significant family events and use these as references for drawings that they will arrange into a mandala of any shape - this assignment will teach students how to artistically navigate within a structured grid as we see in Mandalas from varied cultures, TIbetan, and Navajo paintings come to mind.  This will initiate students into thinking about telling a story and observing narrative structures within drawing.  This assignment is made to get students thinking about their families, history, and cultural background as a way of expressing who they think they are.  We may take these and fashion them into fabric or paper umbrellas.

     Second Month:    Art Book:  Students will use information and images from their mandala research to create a multimedia artbook.  They will have access to pastels, charcoal, color pencils, they can collage newspapers or past drawings.  The object of the assignment will be to learn to develop a narrative through visual imagery based on their  previous studies of symbolism in the Mandala assignment.  This assignment will incorporate typography and written word so students will have plenty of time in the month to develop a short story to accompany their 2dimensional images.  They will learn some simple book construction designs and be able to experiment with other designs if they find another usable template.  The books will be from 5 to 10 pages long when complete.

     Third Month:  Triptych or dyptich still life narrative:  Students will be learning and getting more practice developing a visual narrative.  Students will take found objects from Mandala project and copy those objects on a scanner/ copier machine.  They will be attemtpting to consider arrangement, shape, texture and variety of objects.  They will be required to acquire at least ten objects from their home, excluding things like plastic bottles, paper or other 'disposables'.  The first in the series of the triptych will be a reproduction of their copied arrangement of objects, the second will be a close up on an interesting area of that original copied composition and the third will be even closer verging on complete abstraction.  The objects themselves will be used to tell a story.

Vocabulary:  Abstract, Represenational, Non-Objective, Realism, Photo Realism, Collage, Cubism, Symmetry, Asymmetry, Narrative, Balance, Visual Balance, Unity, Movement, Directional Force, Static, Dynamic, Shape, Color, Value, Line, Texture, Orientation, Pattern, Grid, Graphic Art.

    Fourth Month:  sculpting:  Art Book Cask or hand built Pot

          This month will be a general introduction to sculpture using clay and modeling putty.  Students will design a clay book cask to store their completed art books or create a vessel or pot of some kind.   The idea of this assignment is to create a visual, textural relationship between their two dimensional book pages and the container that they will be building.  They will use rolling pins to roll out slabs of clay and learn how to bevel clay slabs, score their edges, add slip and create three dimensional forms using those techniques.  They will learn all about the different stages of clay and firing and be able to answer all of these questions at the end of the course lesson.  A short test will accompany this assignment. :::::

What is clay?  What is a clay body?  What is a slip? What is a glaze?  What does greenware mean?  When is a pot leather hard? When is a pot bone dry?  What is a bisque firing?  .

What is a glaze firing? 


Fifth Month:  2d or 3d Self-Portrait

           Students will have the choice whether to create a sculptural or two dimensional self-portrait in a material of their liking.  I think it's important for people to learn how to draw the human figure in the process of early art education so this exercise will require students to take new pictures of themselves,(they'll know well in advance to the actual assignment) and they will learn how to draw and blow up their images using grids and will learn all about human proportions, scale, and shading techniques.  Students will have assistance from me in learning how to draw the figure.

 Vocabulary:  Scale, Proportion, Golden Ratio, Foreshortening, Pose, (Body Types: Endomorphic, Mesomorphic, Ectomorphic)
Portrait, Chairoscuro, Grisaille, Profile, 3/4 angle, Frontal, Anterior, Posterior.

Final Assignment:  portfolio overview and free assignment

            Students will present their out of class sketches and artwork , journals and poetry and will develop a final drawing or sculpture based on their best out of class sketch, I will help students select their subject and develop their portfolios for the future by scanning, taking pictures and copying their art images compiling them into a portfolio to take with them into the future.  This assignments could be a mixture of collage, typography, drawing, paste., color pencil, sculpture and beyond.   This is the assignment every student will probably have the most fun with after having ammassed their toolbox of techniques over the semester..

THE FINAL TEST: will be a portfolio review to assess student's seriousness in creating an art portfolio.  I will talk to students individually about their developments and recent growths and encourage them to continue with their crafts.  Students will learn how to identify talking points and share their art in an energetic environment.  It is my candid intent to impart a sense of bravery and ingenuity in my students capacity to present and share their art with others.

More updates to the curriculum are coming….

Thank you reading this far - feel free to browse my blog and art images under the photos tab to see my students at work and to view my portfolio.

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