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 cardboard 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
Connecting themes from art-making (physical environments) to self
Critical thinking, observing and applying observations to sculpture
Envision: Where will my character be? How do I depict this visually?
Transferring 3D forms to 2D drawings
Creating sculptures, exploring building methods and reflecting on how each one works and how they’ll apply it.
Learning responsibility and cleaning habits
Reflecting and assessing work, analyzing process and product
Documentation:
Today, students discussed how artists built cardboard sculptures. They noticed that some sculptures were pieced together like puzzles, while others were built using the wavy inside layer of cardboard.
Planning Sculptures
This student is drawing her plan for her environment. She labeled foreground, middle ground and background in her sketch. She also planned out the materials she will use to create the house and yard in her environment. When she started building, she knew exactly what her goal was and got right to work.
The image to the right is one student's plan for his group's environment. This group based their plan on a video game they like. The shape of the pyramid is copied from the game. After being prompted to add something new and different to the design, the student drew decorations on the front of the pyramid. He told his group, "We need to make this more unique. What can we add?" They decided to add a doorway at the bottom and line the top with a string of steel wool.
Painting Cotton Balls
One group of students asked if they could have paint to dip cotton balls in. They knew they needed colorful spheres for fruit, and found a solution. This group worked together to mix several colors, paint the cotton balls, and attach pipe cleaner stems. One student discovered how to mix brown after a few unsuccessful attempts. She told her group, "Remember when we talked about color last week? Blue plus yellow is green, and then green plus red makes brown." This student also wanted clay to create a thicker tree trunk around a pipe cleaner. Since she couldn't find clay, she solved the problem by wrapping yarn around the pipe cleaner.
Two Ways of Supporting Objects
Two different students had the same problem: they needed to make flat objects stand up in their environments. They each found a solution to their problem. One student tried hot gluing leaves directly onto the base, but found that they fell over. His solution was gluing the leaves to cardboard supports (above). The other student used masking tape on the front and back of his buildings (left). He later discovered that he could draw on brown paper bags and use them as buildings. These were sturdier, and a simpler solution to his problem.
Responding to each other's work
Before cleaning up, students walked around the room to see what others were working on. They chose one piece and wrote something they noticed about it. After cleaning up, students drew the piece in their sketchbooks. They practiced observational drawing and responding to art. Students shared their observations with others who drew the same piece. They noticed the materials (wire, cotton, paper bags, paint) that were used and the effect the piece had.