4 Years of AP Art!

I am in a very reflective mood. This year, I taught my fourth group of AP artists. It is SO good for me as an educator to see how far I have come in my abilities to teach and mentor students at this level. I could not be more proud of these girls and the hard work they put in for the scores they received.

Throughout this year (and second semester in particular), I aimed to make the class really special, and to cultivate a collaborative learning environment beneficial for both me and my students. I knew this might be my last time teaching the class for a while!

I thought I would share a few of my favourite projects over the years- the AP art program is going through some big changes this next year, so I may not have the chance to use these again!

• 

  3 Tone Still Life: Metal & Eggs

• 

  Kara Walker inspired Illustration of a Social Issue

• 

  Projection Self Portrait

• 

  Geometric Value Study

• 

  Multicoloured Reduction Lino Print

• 

  Scratchboard

Printmaking on Repeat

Whew, it has been a busy month! I have enjoyed revisiting these lessons  from a few years ago, having made some improvements (check back here, here and here for the original posts).

5th and 6th Grade: Gelli Monoprints

To make these, we first printed a layer of texture on the gelli plates, followed by a second layer using a stencil each student made.

7th Grade: Collographs

Students made collograph plates by gluing textured materials: cardboard, felt, wallpaper, string to a cardboard surface. Students printed an edition of three prints, plus two artist proofs: one in an additional different colour, and one incorporating chine collé (tissue paper that gets glued to the paper at the same time as printing.

Once they finished printing, students covered their collograph plates with tinfoil to create a repoussee of the textures present. Colour and detail was added overtop with sharpie markers.

8th Grade: Styrofoam Relief Prints

The students created these prints by carving lines into styrofoam using a dull pencil. An edition of 3 prints were made, in addition to two artist proofs: one incorporating chine collé and one reduction print with two colours. The reduction prints were made by printing a first layer in one colour, drawing additional detail and line work on the plate and printing again overtop of the first layer in a second colour.

And, amidst all the flurry of printing with 70+ middle schoolers, I decided to host another after school workshop for my fellow teachers!

Keith Haring Reduction Prints

Here is yet another of my challenging project ideas where I ended up learning right along with students! I realized that the concept of reduction printing is one that is hard to explain. While I wanted them to plan out each step of the design, this is not always possible- surprises happen and often they turn out the best. I remember back to the good old days of art school and how difficult it was to figure out how all those layers of colours would interact.

So… reduction printing is when you use one surface to print and print in multiple layers. In our case, the plate was styrofoam, which is not the easiest surface to work on, but it is readily available and is a good place to start. Each time you print, part of the plate is cut away, adding detail and colour to the overall design. Keith Haring was the artist inspiration for the project. We love to listen to music and move around in art class, so I thought discussing Keith’s action packed work would get everyone excited. It was a success! We had a lively discussion about what is considered art and where it should be displayed. Haring is a good example of someone who added to that definition and that made art more accessible to the public.

The finished products of our printmaking unit are multicolour prints inspired by Haring. We used multiple colours and line to create simple figures with a message. The element of line was also used to convey movement and texture. Students created an edition of three identical prints and at least two additional colour variations.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.