What's Going on in the Classroom: Acrylic Painting and Mixed Media Triptychs

I know it's been awhile since my last blog post. All I can say is that our school's art show has finally come and gone and that is my excuse for taking up all my time and keeping me away from this here blog!
We have been working on many different things in our foundations class, but here are the most recent! An acrylic portrait and a mixed media triptych. These two pieces gave my students experiences with acrylic, chalk pastels, oil pastels, and colored pencils. They also studied different color schemes and coloring mixing during these assignments.
With all that in mind, check out these examples:

A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Assemblage Series Finished!

Again, another throwback to a much older post. I finished my assemblage series many months ago and even exhibited them since then! However I am just now getting around the writing the final post about them. It's summer's fault I swear! In my last post which you can find here, I showed the painting of the woman with the ribbon hair, now completely finished it looks like this: 

And this mixed media piece incorporating natural elements, which is finished:

I also worked on three other pieces during this class, they all incorporated fiber arts and natural materials. This first one is a comment on decisions involving love, specifically in my life, but my hope is that viewers will see there own choices and love reflected in this piece as well. 

In progress...

In progress...

In progress...

And finished product, please ignore the other piece in the corner, it was on display when I took the picture. The second of my pieces involved the idea of grief. I used a combination yarn, branches and wax. Sadly, I don't have a good image for this one!

The last piece I worked on was a bit of a culmination of the the whole series. I wanted to depict moments or frames of life and how each moment is a choice and the all connect together and create a 'tapestry' of my life and the choices made therein. As you will see, I went through a ton of steps and reconstructions to create the final piece.

Composition work...

Redo composition

And more composition change.

Finally starting on the final piece.

Got all the pieces on and decided I didn't like it... ripped them all off.

On the right track!

Continuing to work...

Final piece. Although it's not my favorite, I do feel like it communicated my idea successfully and was a good end to this class and series.

  

A Peak Inside My Portfolio: Assemblage Series

I'm currently enrolled in grad school and I have the pleasure of taking an assemblage and mixed media class this term. My favorite thing about a studio-heavy grad program is the guaranteed time to create each week. It's much easier to make that time when you literally have to do it. Also it's something that my coworkers and administrators understand. If I tell them I'm busy in the evenings because I'm finishing grad course work, they totally get it verses just saying I'm making art. Although my admins are pretty cool so that might be okay with that too!

In this class I'm creating some pieces that are going to be a part of a series about life and the choices I have made in life. My hope is that these pieces will speak as a metaphor for the choices and challenges that everyone faces in their lives and as a result, speak to their hearts. Here's a peak at what I've been working on....

Beginning with a pieced together canvas on stretched screen. 

Several of these pieces incorporate some fiber arts.

Beginning the painting

Attached to the canvas.

Creating the textured 'hair' element

This is where I currently am, although very close, it is not finished.

This next piece used both fiber art and some natural elements as well as some cool old piano keys, beads, buttons and random items from around my house.

Yarn wrapped over sticks and twigs

Attaching misc. items to canvas

It's a work in progress, my current goal is to do better at visually connecting the nature elements with the canvas background.

What's Going on in the Classroom- Mixed Media Paintings

Have I mentioned that I love our painting unit? Not only are students sitting quietly and working hard, but they are producing some amazing images! After creating a watercolor composition, we moved into mixed media pieces. For this piece I limited the subject matter a little bit. Each student had to incorporate hand into their mixed media composition. That hand had to be interacting with an object or item. So it was somewhat limited, but the object or item and how the hand interacts with it is up to the student to decide. We spent some time taking our own reference pictures of hands with objects and then we practiced how to draw a hand. I made up a little worksheet to get them started, it looks something like this...

After this basic intro to figure drawing, we talked about how to draw the different hand positions that each student wanted to use. This was mostly done individually between myself and each student. The steps after this were to draw the hand and object lightly with pencil on illustration board and then do light watercolor washes of basic colors to fill in the image. Then student could the choose to use oil pastels, chalk pastels, and/or colored pencils to had shading (depth) and details to their image. Here is what we have so far... we're spending the rest of the week on it as well so these aren't quite done yet.

Practice drawings and sketching out the final image

Finally starting to do some painting!