Silhouettes galore

So one of my favorite photo assignments every year is Silhouettes.  First of all they are really easy, heck most kids have one already taken on their phone so they can easily turn it in right away.  Secondly, they can be really beautiful, and often I feel like I get to go on vacation with my students because most of them have taken their sunset silhouette in exotic locations.

So please join me on this little mini vacation through some beautiful images.

Abbie B.

Austin F.

Emily A.

Jonah L.

Nikole K.

Do you feel like you just took a little relaxing vacation?  This definitely has me dreaming of summer nights.

Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs

Okay if you started singing the title of my post then;

1. your old like me

and

2. now it's stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

But I didn't just do this to torture all of you.  There is a purpose and it has to do with the fact that I had my advanced students take images of signs.  I thought this would be an easy assignment, but I had a lot of students struggle with this task.  Not sure why, but even though they are bombarded with signs everyday they had a hard time finding ones that were interesting or unique.

Jaikob D.

Jonah L.

Mikayla R.

Selfie Time

So I don't get the selfie craze.  In fact, I hate taking pictures of myself, but it always seems like I have a couple of students (usually girls) that I will watch take 5-15 selfies every hour.  How can you look at yourself that much?  Also how can you change that much in that amount of time?

Of course when I gave out this assignment to take a unique selfie, you would think that I am taking their very souls.  I mean how dare I not just want one of their normal selfie images?  I mean, I want them to find a creative way to take their own picture?  I am sure this makes me the world's meanest teacher, but I don't care.  Most of my students will tell you that I have an evil side anyways.

But anyways, here are a few of the more clever self portraits that were achieved and submitted for a grade.

Bailey B.

Brock N.

Courtney A.

Jack G.

Jaikob D.

Micah A.

See they can be creative and have a good time with their own image at the same time.

What happens at school...

So I decided to throw out a what happens at school photography assignment.  Of course I said I want really good images of either items that make school happen, or images of feelings toward school.  I will admit I was nervous because you never know what kids will give you when you ask them to be both creative and truthful in the same sentence, but I think they did a pretty good job.

Emily A.

Micah A.

Remington L.

Do any of these make you feel like you are a student again?

The road less traveled

Do you ever just find a little path and follow it to see where it might lead?  I don't do it as often as I should, I mean who really has the time to just wander aimlessly after paths that might lead to no where or worse a mountain lion.  But that was one of the photography assignments that I gave to my advanced students.  They had to find and photography a path.  It could be any type of path, as long as it was either beautiful or interesting or both.

Emily A.

Jacob L.

Jonah L.

Will S.

What kind of path would you follow in the above pictures?  Do any of them make you want to see where they go?

Catch the light

For one of the second quarter photography assignments I had them take photos of lights.  I figured that should be a pretty easy image to find since it is around the Christmas season.  I was very impressed with what some of them came back with.

Emily H.

Jacob L.

Kayla E.

Sommer B.

Just another day

I like to follow the blog Digital Photography School for some of my photography project ideas.  One that they had this fall dealt with taking unique pictures of everyday items.  I thought that was a great project idea so I borrowed it and I challenged my students to take interesting pictures of things that most people overlook.  Here are two of my favorites.

Emily H.

Morgan L.

Your perspective is NOT a dream

I wanted my Art 2 students to do something with perspective, but that all seemed too easy.  So to add a layer of difficulty or interest (however you want to spin it) to the project, I asked them to incorporate surrealism.  To up the level even more, I had them spin for the type of perspective that they needed to create.  The catagories were; Bird's eye, Fish eye, Worm's view, 3Pt., 2Pt., and 1Pt.

After they spun for their perspective type then I let them do anything they wanted to create a surrealistic image.

Emily A.

Paige Q.

Aboriginal inspiration

I wanted to bring in some cultural projects to my advanced classes.  So after searching for a little while I decided to check out the art of Australian Aboriginal people.  I showed several works of art and a few youtube videos of how this art is made before the students started their own projects.  We learned that there is no set way of creating this art and that it is actually started really different from what I thought it would have been done.  See even I learned something.

Brock N.

Morgan L.

Sommer B.

Tunnel vision

I wanted to do something with paper sculptures in my Art 2 class.  I wasn't sure what until I stumbled onto an old post about tunnel books.  I thought that was the perfect lesson to incorporate paper and images all into one.  I left this lesson a little open-ended since I let them choose between a real book and using paper with accordian folds on the sides to prop it open.  For a few students it was really hard to visualize how to pull their chosen images apart so that they could make a flat image go 3D, but in the end I think the results were quite interesting.

Abbie B.

Emily H.

John S.

Jonah L. 

Laura L.

Mercedes F.

Remington L.

Sommer B.

Tearing up the art scene

Since their legacy ceiling tiles, see yesterday's post, took my Art 3 class so long to complete I knew I had to throw a fairly quick assignment at them to help finish out the quarter.  So I turned to torn paper images.  They could use anything from magazines to construction paper to textured paper that they made, I didn't care.

The only rule was that they could not use scissors, they had to tear all of the paper that they needed and then glue it down with either a water/elmers solution or modge podge.

Emily H.

Kayla E.

Nikole K.

Leaving a legacy?

I have been letting kids paint ceiling tiles for 17 years now.  So needless to say the hallways of the building are getting quite full.

That being said, I like usual, gave the option for my Art 3 students last semester to paint their senior ceiling tiles.  It wasn't until the project was taking them forever this year that I asked why, and their answer was that they wanted to make sure that they were perfect since it would be the legacy that they were leaving behind.  It turns out some of them have been thinking about what they were going to paint on their ceiling tile for years.

I guess I never really knew how much of an impact these tiles had on these kids, but it is good to know that they wanted to take them seriously and continue to make an impact on future generations.

Bridget B.

Jacob L.

Jaikob D.

Mikayla R.

Nikole K.

Playing with our paint

I love to make art messy, fun and really beautiful at the same time.  Cause let's face it, if you are getting messy you are usually having fun and if you are having fun the artwork shows it.

So for this project my Art 2 students needed to paint an animal in watercolor and then either drip or splash or do a little of both around the animal.  The animals did not need to be normal color and so this left them a pretty wide open category.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Abbie B.

Emily H.

John S.

Micah A.

Paige Q. 

Sommer B.