Today, students continued to work on their clay characters, addressing structural issues, further developing characteristics and features, and adding fine detail.
Artistic expression and intent influence materials, techniques, and form in art.
Key Concepts
Planning Form Artistic Expression
Art Focus
You are designers brainstorming ideas for a new videogame and working in the preliminary stages to develop characters and settings. Your team manager has asked you to invent a character and a level for a potential game. They want you to plan and construct a small sculpture depicting this character and any special features they might possess an a sculpture showing a small portion of your game level.
Literacy Focus
Students will: ●write and draw when planning in their sketchbooks ●create clay sculptures based on their planning ●write reflections ●discuss each other’s work during critiques.
Using their preliminary sketches and plans, students will be able to construct clay sculptures which realize artistic intent and express personal meaning.(Creating/ Create/ GLE 1/ ideation/ Technology)
Skills
Evaluating: “What clay building techniques best fit the shape and form of my character?” - Developing an opinion and considering others’ perspectives on art
Praxis: doing first, then reflecting. Learning to build from mistakes
Reflecting, applying learning to the improvement of projects
Creating: applying sketchbook planning to clay sculpting
Reflecting: explaining learning
Analyzing process and product
Documentation:
Sketchbook Warm-up: Today's sketchbook activity played off student's interest in animal sculpture. We noticed that over half of our class had decided to model their characters after animals and thus, felt it appropriate to bring in a ceramic tiger to serve as a sketch model. Revisiting to reinforce the concept of rapid gesture drawing, students were given one minute per sketch for a total of three sketches of the tiger from three different angles. This helped students visualize the importance of drawing an object from multiple angles in order help plan a three dimensional rendering of that object. Students wrestled with the urge to draw information that they weren't actually seeing, like faces and tails. This was an excellent exercise in observation - drawing what is actually being viewed instead of what students think should be drawn.
"After looking at this from all sides I think I could probably build something like it."
"I never thought about what the tiger's back would look like. I guess this would help me if I was making it out of clay."
"It's tough to make my drawing look the way I want from this view. I want to draw the tiger's face even though I know it's on the other side!"
Making with Clay
Though shaping forms out of clay comes naturally, building structurally sound compositions takes careful planning. Based on observations made last week, we knew the entire class would benefit from seeing a demonstration of clay building techniques. Emily took about five minutes to show coiling and slab building and made sure students knew how to secure each piece by slipping and scoring.
Students continued to learn about the properties of clay through the process of building. Many students discovered that coiling is a great way to build with clay noting that it is much easier to create round volumes with coils rather than trying to hollow out solid lumps of clay or stick two large forms together. Several students then figured out that they could smooth out the ridges created by the coils by rubbing a small amount of water over the surface while holding applying pressure on the opposite side for support.
I figured out how to smooth out my coils using slip so my piece doesn't look lumpy.
I discovered that it is easier to make coils for 3-D shapes rather than put two pinch pots together.
I discovered that water and slip works really well for sticking pieces of clay together.
Many students paid close attention to their drawings, using them as references for texture and size comparisons. One student created texture on his dragon by adding scales that were the same shape and size of the scales in his drawing. Another student kept referring to her sketchbook to figure out how large she should make the head of her gorilla in relation to its body. A third student created the head and the body of his dog using the multiple thumbnail sketches he made of the dog at different angles to help him figure out what the back and sides should look like. These students are demonstrating successful planning - a necessary skill in all aspects of personal and scholastic/professional life.