Art History in a nutshell

To end my Art 1 class I give out the mother  of all Art assignments.  I give my high school students 2 and 1/2 weeks to put together a collage of 12 famous artists.  They have to research these artists, pick out their favorite artwork from these artists and then use one piece of their artwork to create their own art history collage.  They are given a sheet of about 50 artists to choose from plus a couple of blanks in case they find an artist that I have never heard of, but they love their work.  I encourage them to transfer these artwork pieces to photoshop where they can arrange their collage, print it off and use it as a grid to help them create the large 18x24 picture that they have to draw.  I strongly suggest getting the planning stages done in the first 4 days, however they never understand why.  For some reason they never get that it takes a good two weeks to draw the final project.

I do have other criteria.  They need to use at least 4 different mediums.  It needs to be arranged creatively, for instance, put a Degas Dancer on top of the Warhol soup can.  They also needed to write a paragraph per artist.  So that is a 12 paragraph paper, just in case you lost me.  In these papers they need to give the title of the work, the artist, one fact about the artist or painting, where they put the image in their collage and what medium they used to create it.  This year's class did pretty good, but next year I am going to require that they tell me which image they used out of the painting.  There were a few that I don't have a clue what they used.

All in all they did pretty good, and I think they put forth more effort this year than in past years so that is an accomplishment all in itself.

Sabrina L.

Joslynne S.

Kelsey C.

Emma J.

On another note.  I am about to have my last elementary class, and while I know it will be a busy 40 minutes (mostly because they are pumped about the last day) but I am ready to be done.  I am sure it will not hit me until the fall.