Oreo Carving

 It's always a good day when you get to use food in a lesson! I found the idea on Pinterest, from another art teacher who based on this amazing artist! Since we were starting clay, I thought this would be good practice for carving into clay and sgraffito. I used generic oreos and they seemed to work out fine. The students had a great time and came up with some fun designs.

Tints and Shades Painting

Another art teacher in my district gave me the idea for this painting unit and I've never seen my class work so hard and be so quiet!

We start off talking about tints and shades and creating a color wheel. I give the option to students to design a creative color wheel showing tints and shades or they can use the circles worksheet.

Then I have them sketch out ideas in their sketchbook and how they could do one big design and divide into eight sections or divide into sections and do a different design in each. We also talk about unity and balance. In each section they paint the tints and shades of the color. When dry, they can outline in Sharpie if they'd like. They always turn out really cool looking.

7th Grade Sketchbooks

I am really pleased at how the 7th grade sketchbooks turned out! Even though it took us well over two weeks. I had decided before school started that I would have all classes make their sketchbooks in modified forms of bookmaking. It wasn't a success and I sold back much of the color-coordinated posterboard I bought to use for the year.

At the OAEA Fall Conference, there were two workshops I took that inspired me for 7th graders sketchbooks. The first was a workshop on handbinding books. The instructor (a fellow middle school teacher) was amazing and I left with a really cool book of my own and a few ideas for next trimester. The second was a workshop on paste painting. It was pretty cool, using layers and assorted items to pull thru the paint. There is a whole formula for creating the "paste" for the paint.

My own little hand bound book

Second painting

I already knew that 8th graders would have "real" sketchbooks and 6th graders were using the pocket folder system. I decided for 7th grade, we would make covers using the paste painting technique. I just used regular tempera paint and then grabbed a bunch of random items to make marks. We had so much fun doing this! And they turned out AMAZING!

using a lace doily

cut up foam circle

a seashell worked great

After these dried, we glued them onto bookboard to create the front and back covers. I used Yes! Paste thinned down a little bit (otherwise is was SO sticky and hard to work with). Then we started on the binding. Each student had 4 sets of 5 11x17 sheets folded in half (to create 4 signatures) plus one from me that had Welcome to Art and their warm-up boxes. We used a western longstitch binding that seems to have held up pretty well. I worked in small groups, teaching the stitch but once they got the hang of it, students were quick to finish.

Once their signatures were all bound, the covers were glued on the front and back.

they lay flat, too!

You can see the binding