mask maker

My roommate Kelsey makes masks. They're awesome. She just created an Etsy shop too, so go check it out.

I took these pictures of some of her masks so she could list them on Etsy, and since I'm shamelessly plugging her shop and abilities, I might as well shamelessly plug my photography too, right? Yes and yes.

Native American Mask:

Elf-Inspired Masks:

Spider Web Mask:

photo a day catch up

i have been the worst about updating the blog with these pictures...so here are loads of photos from days gone by 

day 10: dishes

day 11: trees

day 12: something sweet

day 13: four

day 14: clean

day 16: silly 

day 17: drink

day 18: your next purchase

day 19: colorful 

day 20: what you did today

day 21: an old photo of you

day 8: in my bed and day 9: the letter "e"

i just moved, so my bed is a little bare

baby "e"instein with my baby cousin

photo a day october day 6: favorite smell

puppies! out my window - day five

photo a day october: pattern

i had a lot of trouble with this one, so i tried a few different things but in the end i wasn't super happy with any of them. so i just picked one and rolled with it.

here are some of my shots from today:

 this is the one i ended up picking "officially"

photo a day october day three: yellow

Adv Art: Minimalist Movie Posters and October day 2: Driving

In my advanced art class we are just finishing up a unit about minimalism. They had to pick a few of their favorite movies and come up with several different ideas. The trouble for them was really narrowing down the non essential fluff to really only showcase what was absolutely necessary. It has been such a fun project!

Also, here's my day 2 of the october photo a day challenge: driving

october photo challenge day one: fresh

So this month I decided to challenge myself to do a photo a day for the month of October. I haven't really set any goals for my life in a while, so I figure this might be a good place to start. October 1st is "fresh" so here are some pear photos, fresh from my backyard :)

Linear Equations

After our Zentangle project, I moved on to Linear Equations. 

This is a fun project for students because they get to trace photographs. Zero artistic ability required, yo. It's pretty rad.

So basically what we do is spend a day in the computer lab finding images they can use. These have to be good quality images (no pixelations here folks!) and real photographs (not cartoon images, logos or words).

Students have to find two images that are somewhat related to create their own original composition. It's fun to see what kinds of things students come up with - what are they interested in, etc. Then, when they have their chosen images in the right sizes printed out, they have to figure out where to place the images in order to create their own composition. Then the tracing begins.

We made our own tracing paper by covering the reverse sides of their printed photographs with graphite and then tracing the images on the other side over their final piece of drawing paper. I don't have any photos of the original photographs my students used, I just have the finished products.

This project is good to teach them composition and appropriation of images. Plus it's easy to start out the year with since they don't feel pressure to draw something exactly how it looks, they just get to trace the image. Fun, fun.

Zentangles - Intro to Line

my example for the project

In my Art 1 class we are starting off the year right, and by that I mean full of sharpies, colored pencils and lots of line work.

So to start off this lesson I just did a basic discussion with my classes - what the heck even is line? They were all very mathematical, I'll have you know, what with their segments versus rays versus points in time and blah blah blah.

What it boils down to are these types of lines (as far as art is concerned):
straight
curvy
angular
thick
thin

There were a few more types that varied from class to class, but those were the big ones I hit on. They needed to use all different kinds of lines in their designs.

We started with a large sheet of drawing paper, a thick sharpie and a fine tipped sharpie. The students traced two circles (from coffee cans, etc. so they were fairly large). I had them trace two in order to have one in only black and white and the other in color.

And then I showed them this video and sent them to work.

Here are some examples of what was produced: