The focus of this class is bringing drawing skills into an exploration of acrylic painting and building upon those skills with more and more challenging content. Projects explored in the artwork below include our:

Unusual Materials Project: Using materials that are not traditionally used for art-making to create a drawing. Some examples are spices, pancake batter, cake, lipstick, coffee, radioactive isotopes, and more.

Perspective Drawing with charcoal: Learning to recognize the various types of perspective and how to represent their illusion on a 2-d plane using charcoal. Exploring value shifts and the effect of lighting were an important part of this project.

Strong Composition Assignment: various compositional tools were defined (Rule of 3rds, balance, isolation, repetition, leading lines, etc) and utilized to create an original artwork with a pleasing formal arrangement.

Making Meaning Project: Students chose and arranged objects, lit them, and portrayed them using color to create their own meaning or message.

Students reported that over the course of this class they felt more intentional with planning and their personal art-making process. They used new mediums, used lighting to their advantage, actively played with creating mood and meaning and took advantage of often overlooked visual real estate, like background spaces, to create more opportunity for meaning.

Kathryn D'Elia, Visual Arts Instructor