Mrs. Edwards' Art Class

Welcome back after a long break! You will love what we have in store for you today!

Art students at GCS had a blast last week filming creative commercials for various items picked out by me!
Students used their knowledge of advertisement, character placement, and creative marketing to create a quality commercial for their product or service. They had to include a product name, phone number, and use for the product.

Take a look at some of these great commercials! I think we have some future actors/marketing gurus!

Did you remember to check out our on-the-side blog, www.aBunchofPhotographers.blogspot.com ??

If you forgot, here is a quick recap:
Day 1- Our theme was "Show Your Love" - find you mom, dog, grandpa, buddy, or sweetheart and snap a picture!
Day 2- Our theme was "Capturing the Wonder" - Take a picture featuring the amazing creation of our God!

There is still time for you to catch up and submit pictures from Day 1 and 2!! Plus, the photography fun lasts all week! E-mail all submissions to me at happyedwards77@gmail.com 

Also, get timely updates about what we are doing in art class by following me on Twitter @MrsEdwardsArt

COMING NEXT WEEK!!
 
Starting Monday, February 14, all teachers and students and parents and anybody remotely related to Grace Christian School will begin our wonderfully exciting photography week!

Read more about this on our brand new on-the-side blog!!!

This is something you will not want to miss! Because you are a valuable reader of our Art Class blog, you are among the very first to learn about this one of a kind event!
Thanks for visiting, and be sure to check out this photo blog everyday next week!!

Welcome Faithful Readers and Brand New Visitors!

I have been waiting all week to share the exciting things we have been doing in art this week!! I wanted to celebrate Valentine's Day with each class, so this week was full of parties! I still wanted to incorporate a small addition to our study of possible careers in art. I chose to discuss the field of Culinary Arts!

We got to decorate cookies with lots (and I mean LOTS) of icing, sprinkles, colored sugar, and other things that will cause parents to shudder!! Before decorating, we played some awesome games and posed with our buddies in the Heart Photo Booth. Over all, it was an absolute blast! This is definitely going down in the top five most memorable weeks of art class! I

Now for a look at some of the fun we had:
(Click on any picture to make it bigger)

Kindergarten student, Gabe being a Culinary Artist!

 

Madelynne and Tessa in the Heart Photo Booth

Ashton and Cameron

2nd Grade boys get together.. We missed you, Alex!

Tomi and Skyler

2nd graders showing off their beautiful cookies!

Selena and Amy smiling big in the photo booth!

Gabrielle and Kaylyn- so sweet!

Some good-looking redheads: Levi and Grant

4th graders race to win the "Heart Toss."

Jacob, Isaac, and Luke cram into the heart photo booth!

Drew and Josh enjoying the Valentine Party!

If you're in the area, make sure you stop by the "Hall of Frame" to see even more pictures of the GCS art students having Valentine Fun!! Next week has even more great things in store! I hope everyone has a happy Valentine Weekend!

Welcome Friends!
Week 5 of our study on Careers in art led us to the Craft Artist. For those interested only in their child's artwork, feel free to skip down to heading Our Adventures as Craft Artists. For those with some extra time or interest in my viewpoint on crafts, read on!



Cut and Paste Activities

 Craft vs. Art
I generally do not teach crafts, because they often float away from the ideas and elements of art. We have all seen the Sunday School cut and paste activities that have pre-designed pieces that are basically glued together. While there is nothing wrong with these types of crafts in certain situations, I try to stay away from these in art class. I prefer to teach students how to take the basic elements of art and create their own work out of their own ideas. The problem with the 'cut and paste activities" used as an art lesson is: it does not allow for individual creativity! The whole point of art class is for students to learn skills that will help them come up with a design that is unique to them! Gluing together a print-out of a pilgrim is not exactly unique... especially when every other student is cutting out that same pilgrim! There is such a thing as a artfully-crafted craft! That's where Craft Artists come in! Here is a great explanation of a craft artist from this site:

"Craft artists create a wide range of objects typically by hand. They strive to create unique art pieces such as clothing, jewelry, pottery, mosaics, candles, furniture, quilts, stained glass, and tapestries. They work with a variety of materials such as wood, ceramics, metal, glass, paper, and textiles. ... Many craft artists also employ fine art methods including painting and printing to improve the appearance of their creations. Some craft artists use recycled objects to create their art. Craft artists often display and sell their creations at craft shows, fairs, studios, galleries, museums, and retail outlets."

Our Adventures as Craft Artists
So as you can see, craft artists take their skills to create a handmade item that is unique! Art students at GCS did just that by creating funny and sweet Valentine Cards out of construction paper, glue, wooden sticks, string, and markers. Students had to create a self-designed Valentine centered around hearts. They also had to include a funny or sweet message that creatively captioned the picture. Your heart will melt when you read these mushy, lovey Valentines!!

Welcome back!
Did you already read about the graphic designs of 1st-3rd grade and Kindergarten? Make sure you check those out to hear what we have been learning about the career of a graphic designer!!

5th and 6th grade art students learned about fonts, creative lettering, and how to design a unique font (and come up with a great name for it!) Since, good design includes consistency in theme throughout the whole alphabet, students were required to write out the entire alphabet (upper and lower case) in their new font. They also had to write out the famous pangram: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to test the font in sentence format!

Take a look at these potential future fonts!!

Congratulations on designing your own font, students! Keep up the great work!!

But wait!
There is more to graphic design week! Hopefully you already read about Kindergarten's wonderful creations! If not, check back to read all about how we learned what it means to be a graphic designer!

Art students in grades 1st, 2nd, and 3rd experimented with designing advertisements. What were we advertising? Only the best school in the world: Grace Christian School! Woo!! Go Soldiers!

Oh.. I guess I'll let the advertisements speak for themselves....

Well, I really hope you enjoyed these students' attractive advertising! Stay tuned for 5th and 6th grade's artwork from graphic design week!!

Welcome Friends!
As we continued our study of different careers in the world of art, we came upon the job of a graphic designer! Most graphic designers do their work on a computer, but plenty of sketchwork is done on real paper. That is why everything you will see from this week is not digitally created. Plus- getting the computer to do what we want it to do is sometimes a very hard and frustrating thing!! I prefer to skip the frustration of the computer for elementary students and get those great ideas out on paper!!

Kindergarten has learned what a logo is, how to design something that promotes your product (this includes pictures and colors that relate to the product), and how to make some creative lettering for the whole thing! So what were making logos for? Grace Christian School of course!!!

Take a look at these nice samples of student-designed logos! Pretty impressive!

Nice work girls! I love the creative letters and snazzy blue and gold color choices!! Go Soldiers!