Category: 3D Printer

Week Eight

3/16/2018

National Medalists

It is awesome to announce that we have two BCWMS National Scholastic Medalists for the 2018 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Congratulations to Sophia Bentley for her Silver Medal in Jewelry and Tara Rood for her Gold Medal in Sculpture. Tara's work will be shipped to New York City for the traveling show and we will get to celebrate her accomplishment as a Gold Medalist at the National Awards Ceremony at Carnegie Hall in June!

Awards were made on March 13th and students were thrilled to see their works made the cut. It is an incredible accomplishment to make it into the top 1% of all entries! I am also excited for the opportunity to take another student to NYC for the awards and celebrate the 10th anniversary of my first National Scholastic Medalist who received a Silver Medal in Photography in 2008!

Our high school also had a National Silver Medalist. It is always great to see my former students continue their success at the high school level. Harrison Kosack earned a Silver Medal for his Future New piece shown below.

BCHS Jr. Harrison Kosak, received a silver medal from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for his sculpture, Avian of Pollution. With nearly 350,000 works submitted by students grades 7-12, this award puts Harrison in the top 1% of all submissions! Amazing!!! #bchspride

A post shared by Byron Center-High (@byroncenterhigh) on Mar 19, 2018 at 5:05pm PDT

Working on Spaces

Students worked on their Spaces and Places themed projects this week. I am very excited about some of the work I am seeing and already thinking about Scholastic for next year. It has been a real delight to see how many students have opened up their options with new media like 3D printing. We will continue to work on these next week along with a Perspective Drawing Bootcamp to help students gain skills with perspective drawing concepts.

3D At Work

Last week, students worked on their final collaborative by making the camera you see above. It was fun to see them recreate an enlarged version of one of the many vintage cameras you can find in the high school art room.

This week, we continued to manipulate size with the start of the Alter Ego project. For this assignment, students have the option to either create a mini version of their alternative self or a wearable that helps them transform into that self. Most of the students are electing to create the miniature version. We will continue to work on this project for the next couple of weeks then then finish the term with a project designed by each student.

Getting Ready for #NAEA18

I am very excited for the opportunity to present at and attend the 2018 National Art Education Association Conference in Seattle, WA! It is going to be a super fun time that will help me further push myself as an artist and teacher and I cannot wait to meet up with all of my colleagues from across the country to share ideas and art supplies!

I am presenting as a part of TEAM middle for the fourth year in a row. We are going to combine our efforts on Thursday, March 22nd at 2 p.m. to share our work with Technology, Environment, Assessment, and Management in our classrooms. I love presenting with these teachers and even better, I love our custom shirts we wear when we present together! Last year, I presented virtually so I am excited to actually be there this time.

I hope to connect with many teachers while I am there and bring back the best of what I learn to my classroom right away!

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Week Seven

3/9/2018

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Building More Skills

This past week, students were introduced to their next major project theme: Spaces and Places. It was fun to see students shift gears and think about how we can depict different places based on our experiences and interests.

To get students started, we looked at a variety of artists and then spent sometime on building understanding and skill with two challenges: Fast Collage and Photoshop Challenge 2. Both looked at how we can bring images together to make something new and both focused on students working with spaces by establishing a foreground, middle ground, and background in their work. In both works, students are asked to create quickly. It is always amazing to see what they can make in such short periods of time. The goal is for students to use this understanding of space in their project as they see fit moving into next week.

Here are examples of the work below:

Isaac: I created this by using an abstract collage with various scapes and figures, along with putting an unrealistic twist to the size of figures when looking at depth

Kari: I made an interesting piece of collage. There is a really cool background and the middle ground I had cats and then I had a dog for the foreground.

Bryce: I like this piece because it really shows the horizon and the mountain and also the lake thats in it. This could be one of my favorite pieces of all.

Gage: I made this with photoshop I outlined the mountains and the grass. Then I made the little details like al of the trees in the photo and the twigs on the ground. I liked this because I like to do photoshop.

Madeline: I selected the space challenge because I enjoy looking at the space and see all the cool things out there. I liked being able to create a cool effect with the sense glare and with the stars. It was all cool to see how you could create the planets with different patterns and colors. To see how the project came together to create something a whole image was very fascinating

Eli: In the photoshop challenge 2 I did The space image. This was an intermediate challenge and I really enjoyed it. I Learned many new things with photoshop and how it works. I also use lots of factors of art and the composition to get the whole art work. I really loved how the lens flare and the stars make the space look really realistic.

Olivia: To create this piece I used a graffiti name maker to create my name in graffiti. After that I put it onto a photoshop piece with a picture of the wall. Then I made it look like the graffiti was painted on the wall and had been weathered there over time. This made it look real even though it isn't, and that is why I decided to do this piece. It looks so real and it's really cool to have my name painted on the wall.

Niklas: I created this name using Graffiti Creator. I think the shape of the letters look very cool and I also really like cool colors like blue and green. I think the colors show me as a fun person.

Zander: The hallway I made was made in photoshop and it was made with a line tool, The gradient I used was a cool one that I found and this is what I made

Aron: In this image I have made a hallway. First I took a picture of a hallway, and I used the pen tool to fill in the lines of the image. After that I then used the gradient tool to make the background colorful. Finally I used the extort tool to add some cubes for the background. I selected this project because I wanted to try the most challenging project available, because that is kind of fun and the most rewarding in the end.

Technology-based Work

In my STEAM class, students are focused on technology this week for their second major "Can Do" project. They could make anything as long as it was technology focused. It was fun to see the variety of works students have started to make and how they have employed materials we have obtained thanks to grants from DonorsChoose.org and TangerKIDS.

We will be finishing up these works this week and moving onto the next focus: Engineering.

Mini-Hideaways

My 3D students are working hard as we hit the final stretch of class and our last major projects before we complete the course at the end of April. It is crazy to think of how quickly we have gotten to this point. This week, students finished working on their mini-hideaway projects and took photographs of them on their desired locations.

It was neat to see them completed and on location as well as read why students selected the places they did for their work.

Last Collaborative

One of my favorite components of this course has been the amount of collaborative work students have done along the way. We will be finishing our final one next week, where students are asked to create a large cardboard camera.

My students decided to use this older example as their inspiration and also make it wearable (since our next project deals with wearable works). It will be fun to see this come together in the next week.

Making Connections

This week was also spent making connections with our NIS program through Google Hangouts. It was fun to have students discuss various opportunities to create in our program and answer questions from 6th grade students about what it is like to be in Art and STEM in 7th and 8th grade.

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Week Five

2/23/2018

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Working

It was exciting to see student use the smART lab space this past week. I still need to organize items to best fit our needs, but this was a great start!

Students finally began to dive into their first major theme of the semester: You, Me, Everybody. In doing so, they started developing sketches and ideas of what they wanted to create for their work and using the various skill-building exercises, applied the media they deemed most appropriate for the assignment.

This is always an exciting time in the classroom because there is so much happening and so much potential for what can still happen. I am excited to see these works develop over the next week and be submitted to our online gallery for a grade.

Here are some of the works in progress below:

Panels Complete

We finally finished the larger set of panels this week. It was a lot of work to get them completed, but I think the results were worth it. These will now go into the office for display in our conference room.

Miniature Hideaways

In my 3D Design class this week, we glazed our descriptive word ceramic forms and started the miniature hideaway project. We are using celluclay to cover the forms and so far it is working out quite nicely.

I am excited to see these works finish up next week and then get photographed on location.

I am particularly excited to see how students apply the finishing touches and where they decide to photograph their work.

Meijer Great Choices

Finally this week, students were given the opportunity to participate in the Meijer Great Choices Film Festival by creating videos on topic-specific content like Celebrating Diversity and Making Healthy Choices. We had two entries for this year and you will be able to vote for them starting on March 1 by going here.

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Week Seventeen

1/12/2018

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Finishing up the Semester

As we near the end of the semester, students were asked to go through their portfolios on Artsonia and select a piece they would like to revisit in ways that would help them show growth over the term. This is a variation on a project I ask students to engage in annually as a way to pause, reflect, and react to the learning that has happened during their time in the art classroom.

It is very exciting for me to see students use this project to show what they have learned. It is also interesting to learn why students select the works they want to revisit. For some, it is because it was their favorite thing; for others, it was something they struggled with at the time and this is their chance to do something better. Regardless of the reason, I am thankful that students had a chance to do this and I really enjoyed reading their statements that went with the work.

Ashlynn: I did this flower because in fifth grade I did a water color flower, and for something old something new I decided to take the techniques from the fifth grade art work and make it better. So I colored my flower and used water color paint, just like I did in fifth grade.

Kennedy: For this projects I decided to re-make a shoes drawing i did with pastels in 5th grade. I started out by looking at my shoe and drawing out the outsides and the lines, then i colored it in. I did the same thing with the other shoes, only using pencils instead of colored pencils. For my background I used water color to make a splash pattern by blowing on it.

Serenity: I decided to recreate my watercolor flower painting from 5th grade. In the original I didn't make it look like a flower very well. The flower was too zoomed in. However, in this piece I zoomed out and made it look more like a flower. I made a new work that focused more on the content of the painting. The original also had colors that were not blended and causing the work to have poor craft. In this piece the colors that I used were blended together more, causing the work to have good craft. This art work helped me personally by helping me show the improvement I have made not only as a artist, but as a person. I wanted to revisit this project because I honestly thought it looked bad when I original created it in 5th grade. I wanted to take this opportunity to recreate it and make it look better.

Finn: My new project shows improvement in creativity because before I just grabbed a bunch of images off of google and placed them inside my profile, and in this project I made the background inside my face, made the planet, and I made the stars. I also improved my craft. I did this by spending more time on the quality of the components in this project, and in the other project my background was just made out of a bunch of random colors and scribbles. I made this piece the way it is because I love the way galaxy or space things look and also how greens, purples, reds, and blues look together.

Jackson: In the old water color abstract I had diferent clear sections which looking back on I didn't like so with this one its more non objective. Also in the old one I had random scribbles through out it making it worse. I feel like this one was a lot more crafty because in the old one it was just crappy and scribbly but with this one it actually took time. The composition on this one was a lot better too because it used a wider variety of color. I don't really have a personal connection to this artwork because it was "Non objective". I wanted to revisit this because in my last one it was awful and I didn't like it so I thought of this as a retry.

Evie: I remade a piece I made in 5th grade, the year I came to Byron Center. It was a portrait of what I looked like back then and it was supposed to be realistic. Remaking it, I took everything I've learned and made it in a style I draw with more. I decided since this was a remake from an old drawing, instead of keeping the drawing of me in 5th grade, I'd make it how me and my friends draw me currently. I'ts like a persona in a way, it's something my friends have helped me with and I am very grateful for their help. I also made it digital instead of traditional. I took the circles in the background from the last drawing and made it a ball type thing with words my friends have called me and use to describe me. The art remake is very important to me, it shows how much I've grown with people and especially with art. I used far more shading and took aspects from the last drawing (circles and words) and made them into something new and even combined them! I'm far more content with this piece and I hope to learn more in art.

Khiem: This art is the continue of the last art in 7th grade challenge 3 treasure or trash. Some of the thing that I change is the way I chose to color it. In the old art I use the different color but in this one I chose to use My old fashion way, pencil. Something new that I do is the point of view. The first one is up looking down but in this one I chose to look from a wall. The first C is creativity is that I use shading pencil instead of markers. Another C that's different is the content I chose to take a different point of view from the original. This my room that change a little by using my imagination like the fish tank.

Mary: In the revision of the autobiography I did last year, I wanted to re-do my attempt at 'anime' and wanted to improve. I was honestly horrified at the older version, so I just had to redo it.I am also remaking this character; putting in more depth and such.I hope you enjoyed this piece, I cannot wait to make more like it!

3Doodler Fun

This was an exciting end of the week in our classroom as our latest funded project from DonorsChoose arrived! Thanks to generous donors and the matching funds from 3Doodler, we were able to get 6 3Doodler pens for our classroom!

Students spent today experimenting with the pens, even completing some of the projects from the booklet. I am so excited to be able to use these in the classroom and cannot wait to see what students make next with them.

Week One of DE

For the past seven years I have been able to reconnect with my former middle school students as high schoolers in the Kendall College of Art and Design Dual Enrollment program. Each Spiring, I teach a course in either Color, Photo, or 3D. It has been an awesome experience and one that I look forward to each year.

This week, we had our first class in 3D Design. It was fun to see students I once had years ago and meet new students, too. We started out this week with collaborative work, creating sculptures on the first day out of styrofoam cups and some drawing exercises on the second day to prep for some relief paper sculptures based on the work of Heather Hansen.

From what I have seen so far in this short period of time, I know we are going to have some stellar work made by some stellar students over the remaining 14 weeks of class.

Next week, these drawings will be translated into paper relief sculptures (one symmetrical and one asymmetrical). It will be interesting to see how students use 2D images to inform the 3D work they make. This is my first time approaching this project in this way and it was amazing to see how engaged students were throughout the drawing process (one commented that they would like to do more of this kind of work on their own).

Part of my job as an art teacher is to teach the fundamentals of seeing and making art; the other part is to instill the idea that there are multiple ways to make art and that anyone can do it.

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Week Six

10/14/2016

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#WIP

Andrew created a plaster mask of his face so he could use it to get this clay mold for a piece of pottery.

Watching students works in progress (#WIP) has been very exciting this week. Seeing students finalizing plans and diving into their pieces has brought into focus both their understanding of materials and application of the theme's challenge as they see fit to interpret it.

The theme for this challenge is Biography/Autobiography and students are using a variety of ways to explore the ways in which they can visualize this concept. Some students are being more direct in their tactics, using portraiture and figures in their work. Others are being more exploratory in the process, pointing to objects or artifacts or animals that resonate with theme.

Either way, it has been fun to see them work through the ideas and how far some will push the concept and materials they choose.

#SconeDay16

International Bring a Scone to Art Class Day was alive and well this 2nd Friday in October! Students did all sorts of things to celebrate.

We had students bring in scones they baked or bought. Students also made some Scone Day art and poetry.

Aron really summed up the sentiments of the holiday:

My Work

One of the best parts of my job, and something I made sure to write into my Goals for this year, is being able to also work on my art when my students are working on theirs.

Early in my career, I would have never thought to do this. I would hover over students with a careful and critical eye on every mark they made. Over time, I have realized that my students actually do better when I give them the space to grow and they do better when they see what it means to work with purpose from someone who is authentically making art for themselves.

Here are a couple of things I got a chance to work on this week:

I did a printmaking demonstration earlier this week. I used an old sketch of a panda for this work. I am thinking about actually printing it on some fabric next week.

I did this modified contour drawing on Morphi, using the iPad we got from DonorsChoose.

Here is the print from Morphi. I think I might make these into some earrings...

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Week Four

9/29/2016

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Knowing Names

It always seems to take me about a month to get everyone's names memorized. Because I am a visual person, the project that always seems to do the trick for me is the Portfolio Name. Students took about four days to plan, design, and create a name design to show their interests and ideas on their portfolio. They first brainstorm lists of things that they identify with as being a part of who they are and then use that list to create their names.

Not only do I get to know names through this activity, but I also get to know more about my students.

Bella E.: The materials I used to make the artwork was, paper, ruler, pencil, and gel pens. I first made the right measurements to make the letters even. I first started making the flower which is to represent the "b". Then after I darkened the edges of the flower to add texture and shading. Then I made the "e" which is ice-cream. I colored the sprinkles and the cherry. Then I made the basketball hoop, the "l" and tried to make it the shape of the l and used shading to make it look more realistic. Then I also made a husky that represents another "l". After that I finally made the seedling and I had colored the stem. This artwork means a lot to me because I love to plants, then my nickname is ice, and I like ice-cream so therefor I made ice-cream. Then I love basketball so I therefor made a hoop, then I love huskies and totally wish I had one so I figured why not make a husky.

Ben V.: For my portfolio, I made the B into a hand gripping a basketball, and a soccer ball under the basketball. I am personally connected to this because I love to play soccer and basketball. Next, for my E, I drew a fishing pole catching a fish, with a pond under it. This describes me because I love to fish. I have been fishing since I was a little kid. Finally, for my N, I did a different object for each line in the N. The first line is a wakeboard because I really like to wakeboard. For the second line I drew a snowboard because my favorite thing to do in the winter is to snowboard. Finally, The last line of my N is a wakesurf rope, because I love to wakesurf in the summer.

Jack L.: I made my name out of things that I really enjoy. Fishing, Soccer, Scootering, and Listening to music.

Grace W.: So for my portfolio I did the letter G in a christmas way because my favorite holiday is christmas. I made it like christmas by make the lights on the christmas tree into the shape of the G. The next letter is R and I made that into a Hawaiian theme. I took a palm tree and made a surf board leaning up against it so it would look like the letter R. Next I made the letter A into my favorite food, watermelon. I made the point of the watermelon point upwards so it would look like the letter A. Next is the letter C. For the letter C I drew a doughnut. But to make it look like a C I made the doughnut bitten into. And last but not least the letter E. I made the E a beach. On each point of the E there is a different beach activity. On the top one there is a wave, on the second one there is a palm tree, and on the bottom one there is a sand castle with a small tide. And that is how I made my portfolio to represent me.

We also had a chance to work with the 3D printer again this week. Students sent me objects that were personalized to print.

ArtPrize 2016

I also had the chance to spend the day in downtown Grand Rapids with students on Wednesday for ArtPrize. It was cold day filled with a ton of art and fun (and sniffles). I am still recovering from the fun we had that day!

Studio Habits of Mind

One thing I have been working on with my after school art students is the Studio Habits of Mind. I asked them to create their own version of the habits to remember via a sketch note and here are two of the results:

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Week Three

9/19/2016

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2nd Annual STEAM Film Festival

Students spent this week working on and then presenting their videos that included topics about making healthy choices, celebrating diversity, promoting character, and choosing appropriate online behavior.

It was fun to see students work in groups as they took their scripts and storyboard from last week and transformed them into videos this week. At the end of the week, we had students present their videos in small groups as they rotated to different groups. This was a technique we learned from last year that worked well for us in a different challenge. It also helped keep us off the hook if there were internet issues accessing the videos since students streamed them directly from their computers.

Here are a few that were shared and will make their way into various competitions:

One new feature of our STEAM collaboration was having our community television crew visit the kids on our final day! In addition to talking about their work on Byron Center Community Television, students were offered an opportunity to check out and work their equipment and sign up to get more information on volunteering.

There are definitely things we will work on to make this project even better next year. We made sure to ask our students to help us with that by having them fill out a Google Form as a self-reflection. In it, many students said their favorite part of the PSA Challenge was filming and working in groups that included students from both Art and STEM.

Some things they would like us to do in the future is open up even more categories for topics they can create films about in this project.

We will definitely be looking into that...

3D test prints

When students finished their videos early, they were directed to Tinkercad to play with the 3D print designer. We are still learning the potential of our 3D printer, but one student was able to walk away with a pretty nice chicken they printed...

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First Week Review

9/8/2016

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Since starting this blog 5 years ago, I have been looking for new and different ways to share all of the things that go on in our Art room. I used to post daily and more recently have moved to less and less posting.

For this school year, I am hoping to post weekly about what we are working on and how we progress through learning, making, and exploring along the way.

Start with Art

For the past five or so years, I have opened up the first day with clay. We use this opportunity to make our bowls for our annual Empty Bowls event. I am so thankful to work in a community that supports the Arts and that we can in turn support the community through our Art in action. Our Arts a la Mode Night will happen on May 23rd this year and I know it will be even better than last!

Making Marks

In addition to getting students immersed in making art with clay on the first day, I leverage this act of making on day two as I introduced "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds. I have been doing this one for a few years, too, in different forms. I am really in love with students making their own mark after being inspired by the story and then bringing it all together to make something larger than their single part. I hope that can see the symbolism in that as we tackle many challenges together throughout the semester and will need each other to get through many of them.

Here are a few of the finished ones and the classes put together to make larger "dots."

Corinne W.: I consider the story The Dot inspirational because Vashti makes beautiful pieces of art, yet so simple, she feels like an artist. I consider myself not the best drawer but in this piece, I let my pencil just take me away and it ended up better than I expected. I ended up finding things I hadn't noticed before while drawing this, like how the shape to the left looked like a dinosaur, and how in the middle shape looked like a distortment of a palm tree, so I colored it in that way. This relates to the story because it was simple to draw and still turned out good ;)

Aiden: The Dot story tells us that no matter how bad you think you are at art, there are a million different ways to make your art work unique. It connects with my art because I didn't know what to make so i just started making different lines and circles and it turn out pretty good.

Abby B.: A story, known as, “The Dot”, has a theme, that can be interpreted that anyone can be an artist. The story starts as a young girl has trouble on thinking about what she should make for her art class. Her teacher tells her to make a dot, which she does, still frustrated with herself. But when the teacher puts it in a frame the next day, the girl keeps working on more dots, surprising herself with her own creativity. I found this book to be funny and inspiring, and a good message to think about when you work on art. This story helps connect with the current piece I’m working on, known as, the dot. I believe that this project was given to us to show that we can be artist too, know matter what our skill levels are.

Looking Ahead

There are a lot of things we can feel good about that got accomplished this week. And with that in mind, I know there will be so many things to look forward to overcoming this year. This week we got to see the 3D printer in action, relive the accomplishments of the past as a challenge to the future, and get excited about our first STEAM collaborative starting on Monday!

I had an awesome summer of unwinding and unplugging because I know this year will be a big one. We have a lot to live up to from the past and instead of being daunted by it or feeling overwhelmed, it is a challenge to push harder and reach higher! I hope everyone else who started their school year feels that same determination in their gut and leverages it to their best year yet!

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Week Eight

National Medalists

Working on Spaces

3D At Work

Getting Ready for #NAEA18

Week Seven

Building More Skills

Technology-based Work

Mini-Hideaways

Last Collaborative

Making Connections

Week Five

Working

Panels Complete

Miniature Hideaways

Meijer Great Choices

Week Seventeen

Finishing up the Semester

3Doodler Fun

Week One of DE

Week Six

#WIP

#SconeDay16

My Work

Week Four

Knowing Names

ArtPrize 2016

Studio Habits of Mind

Week Three

2nd Annual STEAM Film Festival

3D test prints

First Week Review

Start with Art

Making Marks

Looking Ahead

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Janine Campbell

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