Samantha Nolte-Yupari
K-12 General Art
In K-12 General Art class students work with a variety of media--drawing, painting, printmaking, ceramics, and crafts as a means to explore, reflect, and communicate about the world around them.
Shoe who? Whose Shoe?
For this assignment, elementary and middle school students used their shoes as a drawing subject to practice a variety of drawing techniques--contour line, value drawings, negative space drawings, etc. Admittedly a traditional drawing subject in schools, as a class we expanded our consideration of shoes by viewing them as material cultural artificats. We began by examining and discussing the purpose of wearing shoes--what are they made of? How, when, and where are they worn? What can we tell about someone based on their footware? Students explored first in small groups using mystery shoes and tried to determine as much as they could about the wearer. Then we considered as a class what would change about our perceptions when we learn that all of the shoes (a boot, a sandal, a high heel, a running shoe, and a pointe shoe) all came from the same person. Students then went home and looked through their own shoes to consider and choose which one they would draw for class.
Collaborative Color
In this assignment seventh grade students worked collaboratively as a class to pick an approach to painting individual murals on the cinderblock walls of the art room. Students chose to explore optical illusions and color theory in order to develop their designs. Students, many of whom had never had the opportunity to paint before, then practiced and applied their color mixing, color blending, and geometic shape skills to their finished tempera painted mini-murals. Each student had one cinderblock wall space of their own.
Printmaking Moments
For this linocut printmaking project, middle and secondary students wrote down favorite personal or family stories to share and then used the story as a prompt for an independent linocut project. Students, also experimented with variations on paper choice and ink combinations for their final printed editions.