Teaching
I have decided to post a huge post on all of my favorite assingments I have given this past year.
If anyone teaches art foundations, feel free to steal some of these, as I have stolen one or two or three as well.
This is to the best of my ability to remember all the projects I have done with students. I have many more that are more about specific skill sets and don’t really push creativity such as Color Wheel Analogous Mandals, Color Logo recreation using complementary color palettes, (actually that one might be interesting to you. They repaint the logos using the real color of the logo on the left half, then the right half is in the complements of those colors. It leads to a nice conversation about the power of colors related to consumption)
Sorry it is so long, and the spell checking has not happened.
Cutest Robot in the world.
Students will draw the cutest robot in the world, then each robot will battle each other in crit mode, and we will determine the top two robots. WE will then translate the small 8 by 11 drawings to 15 foot drawings using a grid method, then we will build them out of cardboard, pipes, and various materials to be able to stand at 15 feet tall. All 8 robots (2 per class, 4 classes, will be displayed in the third floor area)
Cape Project
Design a logo for a cape using felt, glue the logo on your cape and wear it for a day. Write about what happens, and the feelsing and thoughts that occur.
Heroes and Villains Pageant
Students are asked to come up with a superhero identity for themselves that contain something about their own life they are either extremely good at, or something they want to overcome. After which they have 2 to 3 weeks to generate a complete costume that they wear in public parading around the campus protecting the university from EVIL.
Reason to Draw (assisted living community)
Students are invited to go as a group to an assisted living community. They then are paired up with a resident and invited to do a portrait of them. Through the process of observing them, conversations will happen. Generally speaking the residents are extremely open about their life and have countless great stories for the students. Which lead us to the next project. One version of the next project was to ask the residents about artwork that they felt was missing from their room. The students then generated those works and had s show at the home and then donated them to the people living there.
Elder Stories (zine about, by, and for our elders and the next generation)
The other version of the second half of the project was to compile the stories, collect photographs, scan them, and generate new drawings turning them into a book for the residents which enough were printed for everyone to have one.
Color inventory
For this project students make three copies of a historical work of art, cut them up using exacto’s and generate a bar graph of color for one, a new collage for the other, and use the third bits to recreate someone else’s historical project.
Boring Landscapes
Students bring in 3 photographs of the most boring landscapes possible. I enjoy the ones with extremely muted tones of the spaces between strip malls. Recreate each image at least 3 times trying to match the colors as close as possible in a scale of 3 by 4 paintings. Start with the smallest brush possible and then move up in brush size with each successive painting, the goal is to start to generalize marks, and work within more difficult abstraction of spaces.
Thrift Store Painting
Have students look through the book “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw, every students needs to write out five subjects from the paintings that they feel should be in a good thrift store artwork, place all words in a hat and then have them pull out 5 to use as their source material for their own thrift store paintings.
Kara Walker Fear Project
Students will generate large scale black cut out silhouettes of a life fear that is extremely personal yet can speak to a broad audience. Scale, craft, content, and clarity are our major concerns as well as execution and cleanup.
Graphic Novel Single Page
Students will generate an inked black and white graphic story that possesses elements of the uncanny, fear, psychological tension along with visual tension and interesting compositions. Story, clarity, enjoyment of reading and stylistic inventiveness are our goals.
CAC Project
Students write out a dream, have them google image search each word, collect one of the first 10 results, pull into illustrator and generate new “liquid archives of designs” by redrawing the images and combining them into new forms, each new picture sentence should be labled at the bottom with the corresponding sentence.
Photo Principles of design
Students will use digital cameras as well as simple design exercises to demonstrate a knowledge of 2-D principles.
Tableau Photography
Students will investigate the work of performative photography and generate tableau photographs that deal with psychological spaces and social constructs.
Obsession Project
Students will mine their own guilty obsessions to construct a project that will be graded based on teachers’ impressions that they might be crazy. The goal of this project is to push both the content and the craftsmanship to demonstrate an OCD approach to making art.
The one page description of eating the apple
This should be roughly a 500 word description of eating an apple. The purpose of this project is to have them carefully observe and record stimuli all around them.
The monster project:
Students are asked to print out 30 photographs of objects in the world. These are usually extremely uninteresting images of trashcans, telephone poles, benches and other various objects in the public places. They are then asked to turn those items into monsters. This can be done on the actual photograph, or on the actual object in the world and then re-documented.
Foam Core Reality
For this project students are asked to re-create an object in the world at a 1 to 1 scale using only foam core. The goal of the project is to paint and distress the item so that it looks completely seemless and appears to be real in space.
Mystical Properties of Playdough
After looking through the book of works by artist Genus TOM FRIEDMAN students are asked to respond to his playdough pill project, and his junk drawer playdough piece by working collaboratively to generate a new collection of ojects and bits each under 2 inches in size of real everyday junk in the world
Self Portrait series
These are self portrait projects that go beyond the everyday, and force the artist to be extremely inventive. Usually they will have a mirror and a few photographs of themselves, at least one should be of their whole body.
Self portrait as your arch enemy
Self Portait as your evil Twin on a soap opera
“ “ as a teddy bear
“” as a super hero
“” in the job you are glad you never had
“ “ in the job you always wanted
“ “ as one of your parents
“ “ after being attached by a bear
“” as a ghost
“” as a warewolf
“” in armor
“” in the dark wearing sunglasses (this one is fun to actually do with the lights out and everyone is wearing sunglasses trying to draw themselves looking in mirrors)
Mail Art ALA Ray Johnson
Students watch part of the film How To Draw a Bunny about the life of ray Johnson and then generate mail art to send to people pulled out of the phone book.
Found Gray Scale
Searching for scraps, junk, etc students are asked to generate gray scales that represent 10 value changes using only found materials.
Line in Nature
After watching the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy
Students are asked to go out into nature and generate 8 colaborative land art projects. With a class of 20 this usually means they have to take direction from different people as their leaders.
You needed this
Students are asked to find a sign in public that is hand made by someone and generate a new sign for them that helps to improve their message, the clarity, readability, or simply fix the spelling and or design. They are then to freely give them to the owner, or put them up beside the original if the owner is unknown.
Find your Own Carl
Carl works on the top floor of the tower at UC, he is extremely interesting and people need to know more about him. Make an information poster about a stranger that you meet this week, design the posters around a similar aesthetic and post them in groups.
Make a poster about your day (from Learningtoloveyoumore.com)
Print 20 and hang them around your neighborhood or where you work.
BOOB TUBE
Stand behind your television set with a camera, wait for your loved one, family member, or friend completely forget that you are there, this may take a while. Wait until they are totally engrossed in whatever is on TV and then when they are no longer “alive” photograph them.
Group Portrait in a pointless location
Photograph a group of people in a public place. Restrictions, you cannot know any of them, and you must ask them to all group together face the camera and arrange them so they are all centered in the frame and not cut off. Just like you had to do in elementary school.
Bus Ride to Enlightenment
Ride the bus till the end of the line, write in your journal about who came on and off the bus, what happened on the bus, what you saw out the window. At the end of the line, walk slowly and deliberately around the new location. Photograph a simple shrine that you set up to celebrate this new location.
Marble Project
Make a marble move for exactly 30 seconds and then have it come to a complete stop. Prizes are awarded for the people who get it to come within 3 seconds of 30. You can only do one action to start it. (Best solutions so far attaching it to a cell phone which the person calls and then hangs up at exactly 30 seconds, dropping the marble into a tube containing a thick oil that slows it’s fall to 28 seconds, dropping it into a homemade rube Goldberg machine.
The Found Expert
Students have 15 minutes to go find someone to teach the class something, these people have to not be friends or colleagues of the person, bring them back to class and each person will have 3 minutes to teach us something new. (my favorite expert taught us the first word he learned in sign language, both his parents are deaf and he learned sign language before he learned to speak.)
Recreate a poster from your teenage room from memory
Idea from Learningtoloveyoumore.com
Recreate a dollar bill from Memory
This is interesting and actually extremely good as an icebreaker because there is so much to talk about here.
Protect this from Dust
Design a book jacket for a library book that you felt was extremely influential in your life, add the call numbers etc to the jacket and design it to fit on a real book in the library, secretly insert it into the collection. (this is something I want to do on a grand scale at a public library)
Sign of Great Importance
Construct a temporary sign for a public sight of importance that currently does not have one. This can be a sight of some event of your life, or some event in the news that you feel people should know about.
Your name in lights
Students are asked to sign their name in the upper right hand corner of the page, then enlarge that signature exactly to scale of one to 4. I.E. if their name is 3 inches long the recreated name must be 12 inches long. Their usual first move is to just re-write their name bigger, but hey have to measure each section, and every curve to re-create it exactly in scale.
After they have re-drawn their signature they are then asked to turn it into a neon light using pastels… Realism is the goal of this project.
Perspective changes
Students will spend 4 hours drawing a still life from 15 feet away, using organizational lines, contours and gesture, at teach 30 minute mark they are to move 3 feet closer to the still life. Every time they move things change and they have to rework the drawing from a closer position. This works best with Vine Charcoal and chamois cloth because they can be quickly erased.
Jim Dine School Of Drawing
Jim Dine believes that you can not teach drawing, only seeing. His students work on a fully realized still life for an entire period, and then are asked to erase the whole drawing at the end of each session. Durring the final session they will be allowed to use new media and eperemental media to work into the history of their drawing, and not focus on observation of the objects in space, but on the residue and the marks that have been accumulated.
TV Light BOX
Use your TV as a light box and record informational marks and notes about a specific show.Generate multiple drawings that can then be combined into a new artwork map of that information.
Periodic Table of _______
Build an informational map in the style of a periodic table about a specific subject. (Examples periodic table of all the deaths and means of death in Friday the 13th)
Basic Drawing
Something to think about
Some of these might be repeats from before. Sorry.
The Basic Drawing class has always been a full quarter of study of still life. I have no issue with this, if you have no issue with this. However, students, in my opinion, need exposure to more than just observational drawing. They need motivation, and creative problem solving opportunities.
One approach is to keep the general design of the course but add a small think tank project at the beginning of each class period.
An old professor of mine made us do a self-portrait every day. So we were asked to bring a compact mirror with up to class every day. The portraits had odd instructions, or awkward prompts forcing the students to think creatively.
Ex. Self Portrait as your archenemy
Self Portrait as a teddy bear
Self Portrait as a robot
Self Portrait under water
Render your face while wearing sunglasses and the light s out
Why don’t you have a job? Why don’t you have a uniform?
Etc.
Beyond the still life
It is also a valuable experience for students to draw things beyond the still life. That means that the homework assignments can be more creative. Draw the scene after you finished eating your dinner, marks should reflect opinions of the food. I have always taken my class to an Assisted Living Community in the 7th or 8th week of class. You will have to arrange it ahead of time with the community, but the students come to draw and then leave the portraits of the folks living there with them. This re-enforces art’s potential for positive impact in the world.
Also looking at alternative mark making is a good idea. This can be land art, folk art, Obsessive Marking, Action Drawing etc.
Collage is a good way to get students to re-look at their work.
I always try to do at least one homework where they learn something more about themselves. Like an illustrated inventory of every object in their bedroom. This is a hard assignment, but can yield beautiful results.
Drawing Assignments
Multiple Sources
Drawing for four hours of a still life every day is extremely difficult for anyone. I recommend you use the last hour to two hours of one class a week to begin one of these homework assignments. They should be open enough for students to find their own solutions, but the problems need to be clearly stated.
HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
11 by 17
Students will draw in situ at the museum, multiple versions of one work of art, approached from different angles showing the frame, and the artworks relation to the floor and walls in perspective.
Taking all those variables of the artwork to their bedroom they are then instructed to find the same angle of wall/ceiling/floor and add the famous work of art to their private collection of furnishings.
SELF AS INVENTORY
For this project students will draw an entire inventory of one type of thing they own. Perhaps it is every piece of cooking utensil, or every pair of shoes. There needs to be at least 10 items to draw. The most difficult task will be determining how best to present the collection? What is the composition of the items, are they all drawn overlapping each other, are they gridded out, are their multiple angles used? Are they close up cropped images of each item? What type of drawing best presents the information?
WHO DONE IT
Multiple 4 x 5 or Letterbox
Students are to examine an area where they experience some daily ritual and illustrate a dramatic story of a crime(ex. Brushing teeth when a robber entered the room and fled through the open window).
In a series of 4-5 fully realized drawings with full range of values students will tell the story of what happened like a crime scene. Without illustrating any figures, we are to understand by angles, dramatic shadows, interesting croppings, etc what might have happened.
One possible solution would be to stage the events and then document with photographs and translate those into drawings.
WONDERFUL USELESS OBJECT
Art works are wonderful useless objects, they do not feed people, cure cancer, or save the planet. They are gestures of an inner desire, of something innately human.
For this project you will take the idea of a wonderful useless object and make it a reality.
Perhaps the new material the object is made of will make it too heavy to use, or perhaps the surface will be dangerous and threatening. Be inventive, go beyond the clichés!
Start by making a list of objects at your disposal to draw and then look for variable ways to make them useless. (Ex. Gun made of bread, Couch made of granite)
SOMETHING LIVES DOWN THERE
As an interesting alternative to the normal, draw your room assignment, now we are moving into the realm of childhood fears. Lift up the dust cover and look beneath your bed. Shine a light from a side vantage point and when you think you see it hiding back in the darkness, draw it in wonderful rich dark shadowy tones.
It is best to start with a medium gray ground on this drawing, and then to erase in the high lights. If you have nothing under your bed, make a still life and borrow someone’s stuffed animal and hide it in the cracks of boxes and shoes.
WHO’S TELLING THE STORY
For this assignment we will investigate perspective in an alternative manner.
Write a short conversation you had that ended badly. Something from your past.
Now you are going to illustrate it from the other person’s point of view. That means you will draw portraits of yourself being looked at, etc. This can be done after looking at Storyboards or Multiple Graphic Novels. I suggest Paul Hornscheimer, Art Spiegelman, Jimmy Corrigan smartest boy in the world, and Frank Miller.
DRAWING FROM FILM
Here we look at time as a marking strategy. Take a Hitchcock film, something unfamiliar to the students and play the movie. Have them illustrate the scenes on top of each other. On one single sheet of paper. After five minutes Pause the film and let them catch up. Start it again, and go for another 20 minutes. Now have them work with the marks, the areas they have drawn in and make something new and exciting that combine observation with the emotional state of the movie.
JIM DINE SCHOOL OF LOOKING
Get the video Dine on Dine from the library. It explains his strategy to get students to not think of their drawings as precious. They draw the same figures for four daylong sessions. At the end of each day they erase the drawing (made in charcoal) and start again the next day from the same spot looking at the same pose, drawing on the same sheet of paper. Everything will have changed. Now the paper has a patina to it, and their perspective will always have shifted if even just slightly. For this project I have them draw the still life Monday in class, then for homework, then again Wednesday, and the final version is the one they keep.
STORY of Birds
Using perspective and observational drawing, generate 8 –10 views of birds on power lines or on the ground or on trees. Use multiple angles and compositions, (Zoom in and out). From those observations drawings now build a one page graphic story of the birds. What were they talking about? Do you even need to show words, or do the images tell us enough about whom they might be? Perhaps they are discussing how much they hate people wearing hats because they can’t poop on their heads?
Boxes become a city
Arrange multiple boxes and/or cd cases on a large surface. Students should make organizational drawing of these shapes. After which they will use Mylar and use the original drawing for inspiration for a new civilization. What is the social situation of the city? How do you inform people of over population without showing any people? Has this city undergone a period of depression or a return to nature?
Negative Shadows
Using one or two objects have students generate a composition that focuses almost entirely on the cast shadows. The objects should take up only 1/4 of the whole image and the shadows should be the focus.
I can fly into the new century!
After students learn to draw through cylinders and boxes, have them generate an imaginary flying machine from the 1899. Use rulers and organizational lines to completely draw through the solid shapes. Start from some research into historic flying machines, and use those for inspiration in multiple thumbnails sketches. Final drawing should be completely rendered.
If anyone teaches art foundations, feel free to steal some of these, as I have stolen one or two or three as well.
This is to the best of my ability to remember all the projects I have done with students. I have many more that are more about specific skill sets and don’t really push creativity such as Color Wheel Analogous Mandals, Color Logo recreation using complementary color palettes, (actually that one might be interesting to you. They repaint the logos using the real color of the logo on the left half, then the right half is in the complements of those colors. It leads to a nice conversation about the power of colors related to consumption)
Sorry it is so long, and the spell checking has not happened.
Cutest Robot in the world.
Students will draw the cutest robot in the world, then each robot will battle each other in crit mode, and we will determine the top two robots. WE will then translate the small 8 by 11 drawings to 15 foot drawings using a grid method, then we will build them out of cardboard, pipes, and various materials to be able to stand at 15 feet tall. All 8 robots (2 per class, 4 classes, will be displayed in the third floor area)
Cape Project
Design a logo for a cape using felt, glue the logo on your cape and wear it for a day. Write about what happens, and the feelsing and thoughts that occur.
Heroes and Villains Pageant
Students are asked to come up with a superhero identity for themselves that contain something about their own life they are either extremely good at, or something they want to overcome. After which they have 2 to 3 weeks to generate a complete costume that they wear in public parading around the campus protecting the university from EVIL.
Reason to Draw (assisted living community)
Students are invited to go as a group to an assisted living community. They then are paired up with a resident and invited to do a portrait of them. Through the process of observing them, conversations will happen. Generally speaking the residents are extremely open about their life and have countless great stories for the students. Which lead us to the next project. One version of the next project was to ask the residents about artwork that they felt was missing from their room. The students then generated those works and had s show at the home and then donated them to the people living there.
Elder Stories (zine about, by, and for our elders and the next generation)
The other version of the second half of the project was to compile the stories, collect photographs, scan them, and generate new drawings turning them into a book for the residents which enough were printed for everyone to have one.
Color inventory
For this project students make three copies of a historical work of art, cut them up using exacto’s and generate a bar graph of color for one, a new collage for the other, and use the third bits to recreate someone else’s historical project.
Boring Landscapes
Students bring in 3 photographs of the most boring landscapes possible. I enjoy the ones with extremely muted tones of the spaces between strip malls. Recreate each image at least 3 times trying to match the colors as close as possible in a scale of 3 by 4 paintings. Start with the smallest brush possible and then move up in brush size with each successive painting, the goal is to start to generalize marks, and work within more difficult abstraction of spaces.
Thrift Store Painting
Have students look through the book “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw, every students needs to write out five subjects from the paintings that they feel should be in a good thrift store artwork, place all words in a hat and then have them pull out 5 to use as their source material for their own thrift store paintings.
Kara Walker Fear Project
Students will generate large scale black cut out silhouettes of a life fear that is extremely personal yet can speak to a broad audience. Scale, craft, content, and clarity are our major concerns as well as execution and cleanup.
Graphic Novel Single Page
Students will generate an inked black and white graphic story that possesses elements of the uncanny, fear, psychological tension along with visual tension and interesting compositions. Story, clarity, enjoyment of reading and stylistic inventiveness are our goals.
CAC Project
Students write out a dream, have them google image search each word, collect one of the first 10 results, pull into illustrator and generate new “liquid archives of designs” by redrawing the images and combining them into new forms, each new picture sentence should be labled at the bottom with the corresponding sentence.
Photo Principles of design
Students will use digital cameras as well as simple design exercises to demonstrate a knowledge of 2-D principles.
Tableau Photography
Students will investigate the work of performative photography and generate tableau photographs that deal with psychological spaces and social constructs.
Obsession Project
Students will mine their own guilty obsessions to construct a project that will be graded based on teachers’ impressions that they might be crazy. The goal of this project is to push both the content and the craftsmanship to demonstrate an OCD approach to making art.
The one page description of eating the apple
This should be roughly a 500 word description of eating an apple. The purpose of this project is to have them carefully observe and record stimuli all around them.
The monster project:
Students are asked to print out 30 photographs of objects in the world. These are usually extremely uninteresting images of trashcans, telephone poles, benches and other various objects in the public places. They are then asked to turn those items into monsters. This can be done on the actual photograph, or on the actual object in the world and then re-documented.
Foam Core Reality
For this project students are asked to re-create an object in the world at a 1 to 1 scale using only foam core. The goal of the project is to paint and distress the item so that it looks completely seemless and appears to be real in space.
Mystical Properties of Playdough
After looking through the book of works by artist Genus TOM FRIEDMAN students are asked to respond to his playdough pill project, and his junk drawer playdough piece by working collaboratively to generate a new collection of ojects and bits each under 2 inches in size of real everyday junk in the world
Self Portrait series
These are self portrait projects that go beyond the everyday, and force the artist to be extremely inventive. Usually they will have a mirror and a few photographs of themselves, at least one should be of their whole body.
Self portrait as your arch enemy
Self Portait as your evil Twin on a soap opera
“ “ as a teddy bear
“” as a super hero
“” in the job you are glad you never had
“ “ in the job you always wanted
“ “ as one of your parents
“ “ after being attached by a bear
“” as a ghost
“” as a warewolf
“” in armor
“” in the dark wearing sunglasses (this one is fun to actually do with the lights out and everyone is wearing sunglasses trying to draw themselves looking in mirrors)
Mail Art ALA Ray Johnson
Students watch part of the film How To Draw a Bunny about the life of ray Johnson and then generate mail art to send to people pulled out of the phone book.
Found Gray Scale
Searching for scraps, junk, etc students are asked to generate gray scales that represent 10 value changes using only found materials.
Line in Nature
After watching the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy
Students are asked to go out into nature and generate 8 colaborative land art projects. With a class of 20 this usually means they have to take direction from different people as their leaders.
You needed this
Students are asked to find a sign in public that is hand made by someone and generate a new sign for them that helps to improve their message, the clarity, readability, or simply fix the spelling and or design. They are then to freely give them to the owner, or put them up beside the original if the owner is unknown.
Find your Own Carl
Carl works on the top floor of the tower at UC, he is extremely interesting and people need to know more about him. Make an information poster about a stranger that you meet this week, design the posters around a similar aesthetic and post them in groups.
Make a poster about your day (from Learningtoloveyoumore.com)
Print 20 and hang them around your neighborhood or where you work.
BOOB TUBE
Stand behind your television set with a camera, wait for your loved one, family member, or friend completely forget that you are there, this may take a while. Wait until they are totally engrossed in whatever is on TV and then when they are no longer “alive” photograph them.
Group Portrait in a pointless location
Photograph a group of people in a public place. Restrictions, you cannot know any of them, and you must ask them to all group together face the camera and arrange them so they are all centered in the frame and not cut off. Just like you had to do in elementary school.
Bus Ride to Enlightenment
Ride the bus till the end of the line, write in your journal about who came on and off the bus, what happened on the bus, what you saw out the window. At the end of the line, walk slowly and deliberately around the new location. Photograph a simple shrine that you set up to celebrate this new location.
Marble Project
Make a marble move for exactly 30 seconds and then have it come to a complete stop. Prizes are awarded for the people who get it to come within 3 seconds of 30. You can only do one action to start it. (Best solutions so far attaching it to a cell phone which the person calls and then hangs up at exactly 30 seconds, dropping the marble into a tube containing a thick oil that slows it’s fall to 28 seconds, dropping it into a homemade rube Goldberg machine.
The Found Expert
Students have 15 minutes to go find someone to teach the class something, these people have to not be friends or colleagues of the person, bring them back to class and each person will have 3 minutes to teach us something new. (my favorite expert taught us the first word he learned in sign language, both his parents are deaf and he learned sign language before he learned to speak.)
Recreate a poster from your teenage room from memory
Idea from Learningtoloveyoumore.com
Recreate a dollar bill from Memory
This is interesting and actually extremely good as an icebreaker because there is so much to talk about here.
Protect this from Dust
Design a book jacket for a library book that you felt was extremely influential in your life, add the call numbers etc to the jacket and design it to fit on a real book in the library, secretly insert it into the collection. (this is something I want to do on a grand scale at a public library)
Sign of Great Importance
Construct a temporary sign for a public sight of importance that currently does not have one. This can be a sight of some event of your life, or some event in the news that you feel people should know about.
Your name in lights
Students are asked to sign their name in the upper right hand corner of the page, then enlarge that signature exactly to scale of one to 4. I.E. if their name is 3 inches long the recreated name must be 12 inches long. Their usual first move is to just re-write their name bigger, but hey have to measure each section, and every curve to re-create it exactly in scale.
After they have re-drawn their signature they are then asked to turn it into a neon light using pastels… Realism is the goal of this project.
Perspective changes
Students will spend 4 hours drawing a still life from 15 feet away, using organizational lines, contours and gesture, at teach 30 minute mark they are to move 3 feet closer to the still life. Every time they move things change and they have to rework the drawing from a closer position. This works best with Vine Charcoal and chamois cloth because they can be quickly erased.
Jim Dine School Of Drawing
Jim Dine believes that you can not teach drawing, only seeing. His students work on a fully realized still life for an entire period, and then are asked to erase the whole drawing at the end of each session. Durring the final session they will be allowed to use new media and eperemental media to work into the history of their drawing, and not focus on observation of the objects in space, but on the residue and the marks that have been accumulated.
TV Light BOX
Use your TV as a light box and record informational marks and notes about a specific show.Generate multiple drawings that can then be combined into a new artwork map of that information.
Periodic Table of _______
Build an informational map in the style of a periodic table about a specific subject. (Examples periodic table of all the deaths and means of death in Friday the 13th)
Basic Drawing
Something to think about
Some of these might be repeats from before. Sorry.
The Basic Drawing class has always been a full quarter of study of still life. I have no issue with this, if you have no issue with this. However, students, in my opinion, need exposure to more than just observational drawing. They need motivation, and creative problem solving opportunities.
One approach is to keep the general design of the course but add a small think tank project at the beginning of each class period.
An old professor of mine made us do a self-portrait every day. So we were asked to bring a compact mirror with up to class every day. The portraits had odd instructions, or awkward prompts forcing the students to think creatively.
Ex. Self Portrait as your archenemy
Self Portrait as a teddy bear
Self Portrait as a robot
Self Portrait under water
Render your face while wearing sunglasses and the light s out
Why don’t you have a job? Why don’t you have a uniform?
Etc.
Beyond the still life
It is also a valuable experience for students to draw things beyond the still life. That means that the homework assignments can be more creative. Draw the scene after you finished eating your dinner, marks should reflect opinions of the food. I have always taken my class to an Assisted Living Community in the 7th or 8th week of class. You will have to arrange it ahead of time with the community, but the students come to draw and then leave the portraits of the folks living there with them. This re-enforces art’s potential for positive impact in the world.
Also looking at alternative mark making is a good idea. This can be land art, folk art, Obsessive Marking, Action Drawing etc.
Collage is a good way to get students to re-look at their work.
I always try to do at least one homework where they learn something more about themselves. Like an illustrated inventory of every object in their bedroom. This is a hard assignment, but can yield beautiful results.
Drawing Assignments
Multiple Sources
Drawing for four hours of a still life every day is extremely difficult for anyone. I recommend you use the last hour to two hours of one class a week to begin one of these homework assignments. They should be open enough for students to find their own solutions, but the problems need to be clearly stated.
HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
11 by 17
Students will draw in situ at the museum, multiple versions of one work of art, approached from different angles showing the frame, and the artworks relation to the floor and walls in perspective.
Taking all those variables of the artwork to their bedroom they are then instructed to find the same angle of wall/ceiling/floor and add the famous work of art to their private collection of furnishings.
SELF AS INVENTORY
For this project students will draw an entire inventory of one type of thing they own. Perhaps it is every piece of cooking utensil, or every pair of shoes. There needs to be at least 10 items to draw. The most difficult task will be determining how best to present the collection? What is the composition of the items, are they all drawn overlapping each other, are they gridded out, are their multiple angles used? Are they close up cropped images of each item? What type of drawing best presents the information?
WHO DONE IT
Multiple 4 x 5 or Letterbox
Students are to examine an area where they experience some daily ritual and illustrate a dramatic story of a crime(ex. Brushing teeth when a robber entered the room and fled through the open window).
In a series of 4-5 fully realized drawings with full range of values students will tell the story of what happened like a crime scene. Without illustrating any figures, we are to understand by angles, dramatic shadows, interesting croppings, etc what might have happened.
One possible solution would be to stage the events and then document with photographs and translate those into drawings.
WONDERFUL USELESS OBJECT
Art works are wonderful useless objects, they do not feed people, cure cancer, or save the planet. They are gestures of an inner desire, of something innately human.
For this project you will take the idea of a wonderful useless object and make it a reality.
Perhaps the new material the object is made of will make it too heavy to use, or perhaps the surface will be dangerous and threatening. Be inventive, go beyond the clichés!
Start by making a list of objects at your disposal to draw and then look for variable ways to make them useless. (Ex. Gun made of bread, Couch made of granite)
SOMETHING LIVES DOWN THERE
As an interesting alternative to the normal, draw your room assignment, now we are moving into the realm of childhood fears. Lift up the dust cover and look beneath your bed. Shine a light from a side vantage point and when you think you see it hiding back in the darkness, draw it in wonderful rich dark shadowy tones.
It is best to start with a medium gray ground on this drawing, and then to erase in the high lights. If you have nothing under your bed, make a still life and borrow someone’s stuffed animal and hide it in the cracks of boxes and shoes.
WHO’S TELLING THE STORY
For this assignment we will investigate perspective in an alternative manner.
Write a short conversation you had that ended badly. Something from your past.
Now you are going to illustrate it from the other person’s point of view. That means you will draw portraits of yourself being looked at, etc. This can be done after looking at Storyboards or Multiple Graphic Novels. I suggest Paul Hornscheimer, Art Spiegelman, Jimmy Corrigan smartest boy in the world, and Frank Miller.
DRAWING FROM FILM
Here we look at time as a marking strategy. Take a Hitchcock film, something unfamiliar to the students and play the movie. Have them illustrate the scenes on top of each other. On one single sheet of paper. After five minutes Pause the film and let them catch up. Start it again, and go for another 20 minutes. Now have them work with the marks, the areas they have drawn in and make something new and exciting that combine observation with the emotional state of the movie.
JIM DINE SCHOOL OF LOOKING
Get the video Dine on Dine from the library. It explains his strategy to get students to not think of their drawings as precious. They draw the same figures for four daylong sessions. At the end of each day they erase the drawing (made in charcoal) and start again the next day from the same spot looking at the same pose, drawing on the same sheet of paper. Everything will have changed. Now the paper has a patina to it, and their perspective will always have shifted if even just slightly. For this project I have them draw the still life Monday in class, then for homework, then again Wednesday, and the final version is the one they keep.
STORY of Birds
Using perspective and observational drawing, generate 8 –10 views of birds on power lines or on the ground or on trees. Use multiple angles and compositions, (Zoom in and out). From those observations drawings now build a one page graphic story of the birds. What were they talking about? Do you even need to show words, or do the images tell us enough about whom they might be? Perhaps they are discussing how much they hate people wearing hats because they can’t poop on their heads?
Boxes become a city
Arrange multiple boxes and/or cd cases on a large surface. Students should make organizational drawing of these shapes. After which they will use Mylar and use the original drawing for inspiration for a new civilization. What is the social situation of the city? How do you inform people of over population without showing any people? Has this city undergone a period of depression or a return to nature?
Negative Shadows
Using one or two objects have students generate a composition that focuses almost entirely on the cast shadows. The objects should take up only 1/4 of the whole image and the shadows should be the focus.
I can fly into the new century!
After students learn to draw through cylinders and boxes, have them generate an imaginary flying machine from the 1899. Use rulers and organizational lines to completely draw through the solid shapes. Start from some research into historic flying machines, and use those for inspiration in multiple thumbnails sketches. Final drawing should be completely rendered.
posted by Mulligan | 11:50 AM
2 Comments:
You are the "power of humility" bumber sticker guy in RVa? do you have any left? or just an image file of them?
Thanks for sharing the list!
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