Students have been working on a variety of pottery on the wheel and constructing sculptures getting ready to do a choice project using their favorite building method. Check out some of our artworks over the past month.

Students in Advanced Art this week studied Impasto, Acrylic, Tempera and their differences in Art History. We talked about imagery that appealed to us and focused our work on producing original color schemes and color blends.

Students zoomed with Scientist and Zoologist and Illustrator Bethann Garramon Merkle from the University of Wyoming. Students explored the field of science and art and created some beautiful works based on accuracy and anatomy.

This year, Sara Forsythe and Colin Bishop took the Advanced Art Students and Ceramic Students to the Missoula Art Museum, Zootown Arts Community Center, and the Clay Studio. Here are some great images of us engaging in art, talking about art, and working methods. We also created some art ourselves.

Students studied Illustration and the use of ink in artworks, illustrations, and drawings.

Inspired by the Illustrator Stefan Bucher, we explored our creativity and created an ink blot using straws and liquid ink. Students had to use the shapes to come up with a character. It was harder than we thought!

The past few weeks we studied how professional artists use graphite and produced some really great landscapes pushing out skills with mapping, learning to measure, and layout from a photograph we found online.

How do we understand abstract art?

High School students have been researching abstract artists, expressionism, and turn of the century artists and presenting their findings to the class.

We each tried to 'copy' and artist original to gain insight on their methods, reasons, and possible meanings.

Enjoy perusing the gallery of some of them here.

Collagraph is a new, modern method of using Intaglio Inks and a Press to create 3D images using a variety of textures to produce detailed images or abstract works. This week students experimented with materials and produced the ones you see here.

We ended our unit on color mixing with a painting of our choice.

High School and Jr High students explored blending on canvas and mixing an entire palette of colors. We experimented with "River Orchid" by Mike Savlen, who paints outdoor themed artworks that often have water features, rivers, and fish. Enjoy our practice paintings based on Savlens blending styles!

After a week of color mixing and learning about color schemes, students completed a step by step painting with Mrs. Forsythe on how to create a complimentary color painting, steps it took to carry it out, and learning to 'stack' acrylic to create depth. We will further explore this with our next project as we learn to 'blend' acrylic right on the canvas with our fish paintings.

Students at the high school last week practiced mixing tones, shades, and compliments to reveal what happens when certain colors and mixed and with % amounts.

We then created these beautiful circular Color Scheme Experiments using simple imagery and blocked out spaces in order to give us enough spots to fully see what our favorite color scheme could produce. Stay tuned for a few painting coming up in March!

A Zentangle drawing is an abstract drawing created using repetitive patterns. True Zentangle drawings are done in black ink on white paper with grey pencil shading. We mixed ours up a little with gel pens and color as an option. Enjoy perusing them!

Students created three mosaics for our 3D project this past semester. It was inspired by a visit from the Clark Fork Watershed Education Program. They presented on Ospreys and Superior's watershed. The art department is working with Science Club to raise funds for an Osprey Nest near the football field at the school. If you would like to donate money to build an Osprey Nest let us know! Enjoy perusing these photos. Students handmade and glazed all the tiles.

Students used pages from a book to do blockout poetry using the words on the page. Their poem needed to have a clear message and the illustration needed to relate to the poem.

Students completed a graphic reproduction illustration of a word using Illustration techniques.

Intaglio Printmaking involves plexiglass, an etching tool, soaking water in paper, and special ink to 'produce' the image using pressure from a press. Each student completed an edition of three.

This past week most students finished their carving and printing on lenolium blocks and ran them through our press at school. We learned about professional printmakers, historical, and new ways of printing. Each student did an edition of four or more.

November was Drawing month for the high school. We developed our skills doing drawings of objects, textures, talked about the history of drawing, looked at master examples, and developed our own style through a series of small projects. Our last project was our portraits in which students chose any person to create a likeness using a full value scale of graphite, blending stumps, and at least 5 varieties of textures. Enjoy perusing their work and see if you can figure out who each person might be.