Hello Everyone! For those of you who have followed me for a while, thanks for the support (even though I have been distant recently). For those of you who have never visited before - WELCOME! 

My name is Janine Campbell and I teach in West Michigan. I am originally from Flint and visit my hometown often (The Flint Institute of the Arts is my all time fav). With the recent school closures, it has been a challenge and opportunity to get some things posted that I have been working on for a while, like this grid value exercise. 

I used this with my 7-8th grade students, but it could be used 6-12th grade without hesitation. The video has no sound, as it is just a demo on how to use value and the grid to create an image. If this is helpful for you or your students, please USE IT! I have ten variations I made on the Procreate Drawing App on the iPad and those are attached below. 

Students did this a few weeks ago to help discuss value and facial features and the use of a grid to translate an image onto another surface. I have said I would be sharing this when I had time to get a post together - well, I got nothing but time for the foreseeable future, so expect more things like this as the days and weeks roll on... 

If you found this helpful, please share on Instagram or Twitter and tag me using @campbellartsoup. It fills my heart with so much happiness to see that something I have made is helpful to someone else. 

Take Care and Make Art! 

We learn best by doing. 

When teaching techniques, it is great to do demonstrations and show students how to use materials and the different things they can do. I have found it is best, however, if I can engage them in an activity that they do and then can decide if they would like to adapt independently to another situation. 

That is what mini-challenges, like this line and watercolor portrait, is all about in my classroom. 

To start, students take a set of notes that define line, various line directions (and we even do a little dance for this part), and then put those lines into action through a series of portraits.

In their sketchbooks, they create a bilateral continuous contour line portrait, a dominant hand-directed contour line portrait, and a non-dominant hand-directed contour line portrait using various classmates from around the room as subjects that switched for each of the drawings.

After these drawings are complete, students were given a 6x9 inch sheet of watercolor and a white oil pastel to translate their sketches onto, creating a composition on the page with the lines.

The following day, students used their watercolor paper with the oil pastel drawings on them to experiment with a variety of watercolor painting techniques. We went over wet on wet, wet on dry, salt, sponge, resist, and a couple of ways you can use the air from your mouth to get a splatter effect on the page. 

Once the watercolors were dry, students went back in with sharpie and made choices about where to add emphasis. This was a fun way to talk about materials, abstraction, and how artists can adapt ideas for future projects. 

I know students will use these concepts in different ways throughout the term and I look forward to seeing their results. 

Getting to know students is the most important thing when starting out the school year. Knowing their interests can be key to developing classroom culture and helping students when they are stuck on a design challenge and not sure where to go with it.

One way to draw out those ideas visually is through a design challenge that also helps decorate the front of student portfolios: The Personal Logo Challenge. In this challenge, students are asked to create their own logo based on who they are. 

To start out student are asked to make a list of four to five of their favorite things in their sketchbook and then draw a symbol or sketch that represents what they wrote.

We then look at a variety of logos. From fast-food to clothing companies and cars, we look at a wide variety of logos and examine how color, font, and overall composition can help offer the viewer ideas and insight about what the company sells or what core values the company is trying to portray. After looking at large company logos, we then turn to logos associated with specific people and compare the way they look. 

After that, students are asked to review their lists and symbols from earlier and find ways they might be able to combine ideas, use select font styles, or other visual cues to create potential sketches of their logo. 

Once they have three sketches of possible designs, they select one to apply to their portfolio. After sketching it out on their portfolio they are asked to use colored pencil and/or marker to complete their work. 

This opening project is a great way for me to get to know my students better and it also helps me teach concepts about composition as well as colored pencil and marker techniques.