As I was thinking about what artwork I wanted to blog about I started going back through the images of my students work from this past semester.   I worked with students Kindergarten through 8th grade and before I taught a lesson I would make exemplars for each project.  I must be a little kid at heart because I had so much fun playing with paint, markers, wire, etc.  I had more fun making the projects than the kids did at times because I better understood the different mediums and how best to manipulate them.  Projects I thought would be a blast for the kids turned out to be exhausting because I ended up having to do so much work with each student individually.  With a classroom full of 20 to 30 students one on one attention is not an easy thing to do.
 So all that being said I decided to show pieces that I made for the students and then the students pieces which coincide with them.  This first piece is a project I created for my seventh graders at Pioneer Ridge Middle school. While student teaching I had the opportunity to attend a planning session of all the middle school teachers in the district.  There are over a thousand teachers in the Independence Public School District, and I was a little surprised to see only four middle school art teachers.  At these monthly meeting each teacher would bring a lesson plan or two which they had created for their kids and present it to the group.  One of the lessons was entitled Zentangle, a term I had just been reading about while looking for ideas for upcoming lessons.  Zentangle is an easy to learn method of creating beautiful images from repetitive patterns(artteacherscloset.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-art-room-zentangles.html), in case you have not heard of it.  I have always loved creating my writing styles, in high school I would draw my friends names out for them in Old English script for them for fun.  The idea of doing a project inspired by Zentangle seemed like a lot of fun.  
I started with the handout I was given and drew an E for my first initial. My host teacher Faith said she had about a hundred 8x11 canvases boards which were given to her and a box of various gauge wire that I could use it I wanted.  The project just kind of fell together as I was playing with the materials available to me.  Each student picked one letter from their initials, drew it using Zentangle inspired designs filling an 8 x11 piece of paper, painted over top their pencil lines with back tempra, used water color to fill in the spaces and add another design element, and finally used varying types of wire to make the letter stand off the page.  I am a perfectionist when it comes to my own artwork so I should have known that this was too involved for seventh grade students when it took me every bit of a hundred hours to finish my exemplar.  As the students were working on their pieces there was usually one step of the process which they excelled at and the rest were a struggle.  Most were able to get a design done and when they started using the tempra to paint over the pencil they would get frustrated with how slow and careful they had to be.  Many started out with intricate designs but by the time the wire was completed most detail was left out.  When it came time to work with the wire many students practically gave up because they couldn't make it do what they wanted.  One student Walter, loved every kind of art but he made a simpler kind of art.  His W here was complete in three class periods I think.  But I liked it more than many of the others because he did the best he personally could do and never complained.  If he wasn't sure how best to shape the wire or make a thin, straight line with the paint he would ask for help and try over and over until he was satisfied with the results. 

The original idea for this project came from a magazine of collaged winter scapes, but the more I looked for specific colors in magazines the harder it became to find enough variations in color.  I love color, and find that I am very sensitive to the subtle differences in shade, tone, and vibrancy.  This was a fifth grade project and my host teacher at the time Kristy, suggested that I use construction paper instead of magazines for the collageing She then showed me her cabinet of paper.  It was a beautiful thing, it really was.  I had so much fun going through and picking out every variations I could find.  It was fun up until I started cutting it all up.  I must have had forty different colors, again a bit of an over achievement.  I was hoping the kids would be able to create pieces with a pointillism quality to them, but realized far too late that these were just fifth graders meeting once a week for fifty minutes.  In explanation of the project I put together a PowerPoint of landscape images, but the students found it hard to be able to draw such detailed images in simple blocks of color.  I had made a collage out of magazine cuttings and was using it in addition to my lesson.  Again the students were confused on what exactly they should be doing so finally I decided to make another examplar for the classes.   I probably spent an entire weekend making the above piece and another similar piece.  Why I thought fifth graders could ever be expected to put anywhere near that much work into a project is a mystery.  I had a lot of fun doing this piece and my students seems to really like sorting through all the colors and wasting lots of glue.  The one element that I think really helps the collages make sense was adding the black tempera paint outline, and I owe it all to one of my students.  She asked if you could outline the edges of each section of color to help each one be more readable.  I was very resistant to put black paint on top of something I put so much effort into, but in the end it makes each images stand out to much more. 
I spent entirely too much time and effort on this piece but it was worth it in the end, for me anyway.  The student's pieces was awesome.  Even some of the ones I was skeptical of at first ended up being the greatest after a bit of black paint.