The new term has started and the new 6th graders have begun art! To catch you up on what we've done so far - we did a one day project called "Make Your Mark" and we each made an abstract square cut paper piece to represent who we are and make our mark on the classroom! After that we talked about the art studio agreement (can be found on the resources page), made portfolios and learned some fun facts about the teachers and each other.
Lastly, but most importantly, we learned about our first project - mini assemblage murals in the style of artist Vik Muniz!
SO WHO IS VIK MUNIZ?!
Artist Vik Muniz is a world renowned Brazilian artist and photographer. Students watched clips from Wasteland, a documentary capturing the life of Vik Muniz as he travels to Brazil to visit the worlds largest landfill. It is here that he will meet a group of very special people that will become the subjects of his artwork. He learns about the "pickers" as they are called, people who work at the landfill, sifting through all of the garbage to separate all of the recyclable products in order to make a living, support themselves and their families. After meeting them, he begins taking photographs of them and then uses the garbage to assemble large-scale portraits of the pickers. The assemblage portraits are then photographed and turned into extremely moving portraits to honor these people and all that they do. Check out an example of one of them below!
For 6th graders, they will be choosing a photograph of something that they enjoy and redrawing it onto a fresh piece of paper and then creating the image out of assemblage items. Check out some of the photographs 6th graders chose!
In the meantime, students have been working on 2 quick practice projects before jumping into this project. In order to be successful with the project, students need to understand how to discern values when looking at an image as well as how to work with small assemblage pieces in order to keep the shape and proportions. So, students first began by doing a paper value practice page in which they had to use different colored torn paper to create a sphere that has shading so it looked 3D. Check out the sample page they glued their pieces of paper on top of.
Check back to see their work soon! After doing this, they created blind contour and contour line drawings of pumpkins in preparation for re-drawing their photograph on their final draft paper. Check back to see images of those too!
It's been a while since I have posted...
It has been a crazy year so far but now that I have some time over holiday break it is time to update everyone on what your wonderful students have been accomplishing in art...because it has been A LOT! Get ready for lots of photos of their work!
First up is a batch of just the very beginning stages of 6th graders' assemblage collages, I will post photos of the final products hopefully next week!
CHECK OUT PHOTOS FROM THE QUARTER 2 ART SHOW HERE!