AVI1O - Making Inferences and the Function of Art

In today's class, we collaborated in groups of two or three. One of our curricular goals is to identify the functions of various types of art work in past and present societies.  We examined art from our own country taken from World War One (Remembrance Day is just around the corner).  Each group was assigned a poster that was used for a specific purpose during the war.  Here are the questions that you were asked:

1) Identify the function of the art in the poster you were given.

2) Identify at least two elements of design/principles of art in the poster and explain how it was used.

3) Explain your personal interpretation of the poster.  What can you infer from what you see?

Here are examples of the posters that we used:

Wednesday Oct 22, 2014: Literacy Day Activity! AVI10 and AVI2O

1) What is the best title for this picture?

Follow the Leader
A Halloween Parade
The March of the Panda Bears
Walking into A Ghost Story


2) What probably won't happen next?

the children will make a jack-o-lantern
the children will follow the panda bear to a secret place
the children will get very scared
the spooky fog will grow thicker


3) What is not a supporting detail in this picture?

the children are in costumes
the panda bear is at the front of the line
the leaves are orange
it is Halloween


4) Which word best reflects the main idea of this picture?

trust
adventure
Halloween
fog


5) What can you not infer from this picture?

the panda bear knows where he is going
the children are afraid
the parents are worried about the children
the children don't know where they are going


6) Who is the main character in this picture?

the boy dressed as a monster
the panda bear in the robe
the girl in the white dress
the boy in the pirate-owl costume

Taken from http://literacyhead.com/lessons/practice-tests/1688-standardized-reading-test-strategy-practice-practice-test-12

All Grades!! - Rhythm Review

Visual Rhythm 
• Visual Rhythm is a Principle of Art.
• Visual Rhythm is rhythm you receive through your eyes rather than your ears.
• Visual Rhythm is created by repeated positive shapes separated by negative spaces.
• Visual Rhythm is all around us.


FIVE TYPES OF RHYTHM 
• Regular
• Alternating
• Random
• Flowing
• Progressive

Regular Rhythm 
• Regular Rhythms and patterns have identical motifs or visual beats.
• They have an equal amount of space between motifs.
• Parking spaces are laid out in a regular rhythm.
• Bricks on a wall form a regular rhythm.

Alternating Rhythm
• Alternating rhythm and pattern can be achieved by changing motifs at regular intervals.
• Think of the black and white squares on a chess board.
• Here the elephants alternate color and direction.

Random Rhythm 
• The motif is repeated in no apparent order.
• You can not predict exactly where the next motif will be.
• Splashes of paint on a wall would create a random rhythm.

Flowing Rhythm 
• Flowing rhythms are created by repeating wavy lines and curved shapes.

Progressive Rhythm 
• In progressive rhythm there is a change in motif or visual beat each time it is repeated.

AVI1O Perspective

Perspective


Perspective is a method of representing subjects (and the individual parts of subjects) in a drawing, in such a way that they seem to recede into distant space, and appear smaller the farther they are away from you. When you are drawing trees and flowers, minor errors in perspective tend to be negligible. However, most human-made objects, people, and animals need to be drawn with proper perspective in order to appear believable and proportionately correct. Proportion is the relationship in size of one component of a drawing to another or others.




YOUR EYE LEVEL IS ON THE HORIZON
In art, a horizon line is a horizontal line (usually invisible in real life) sometimes referred to as eye level, that divides your line of vision when you look straight ahead. Objects below this line are below your eye level, and objects above it are above your eye level. Remember, your eye level and the horizon line, are one and the same. Look straight ahead (rather than up or down), and the horizon line is directly in front of you. Wherever you go, from the top of the highest mountain, to the lowest valley, your eye level always stays with you. The easiest way to identify the location of the horizon line in an actual scene is to visually mark it with your eye level. Try to find the horizon line in this example:

In the example below, notice how every line that travels away from your view travels to the view point (VP). See how perspective shapes the buildings, or how the buildings form perspective.

AVI1O - Elements of Art and Principles of Design

I realized that I had not created a blog that detailed each of these elements and principles that we focus on in Grade 9.  You are asked to build a definition of each from the glossary in ArtTalk, our text for this course.  Here they are:

Elements of Art 
Basic visual symbols in the language of art:

• Line
• Shape 
• Form 
• Space
• Colour
• Value
• Texture

Principles of Design
Rules that govern how artists organize the elements of art:

• Rhythm
• Movement 
• Balance
• Proportion
• Variety
• Emphasis
• Harmony
• Unity

Literacy Day, Picassofied!!!

Both the Grade Nine and Ten classes participated in a literacy day activity.  It's one of my favourites. It went like this:

The students were placed in four different groups. Each group was given one marker colour. Each group started out with a 18 x 24" sheet that had one of the following quotes on it from Picasso (all new from when we did this last year):

"Painting is a blind man's profession.  He paints not what he sees but what he feels, what he tells himself about, what he has seen."

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." (Think about our visual journal work here!)

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."


The students had to analyze as a group what they thought Picasso was implying in his quotes. When time was up, each quote was moved to a different group and the students could then comment on the original quote or the thoughts that the other members had written down. By building upon what the others had written, they could follow the trail of thought that their classmates left for them, while pondering the original quote in their own way. Here is the result:

We then had a great discussion as a group as to the meaning of these quotes and their implication in our society. We also focussed on the importance of implicit vs explicit questioning on the upcoming literacy test. This was one of the most fun and interactive classes we have had this term. Way to go 9s and10s!

AVI1O Curricular Question of the Day!

As we explore the elements and principles of design (on the wordwall), I ask you how you can employ them to create art that expresses feelings, or communicates emotions, to an audience. With that in mind, we will answer the following questions:

“What do you associate with the colour red? How would these associations influence your use of red in a self-portrait? How might other people’s associations with the colour affect their perception of your portrait?”

Here's a great example of what I am talking about, taken from http://www.soularbliss.com/:

or perhaps this use of red, taken from etsy:

Cross-class collaboration!

Here we have a collaboration that occurred between two different grades.  Grade 10 art student Shawn K. drew this soft pastel piece.

Then Jack D., a grade 11 student, took a photo of the original and manipulated it with photo imaging software to arrive at the following:

Generally, collaboration can be defined as "sharing responsibility in pursuit of a common objective."  Though Shawn didn't know his work would end up in a collaboration, the common objective of an interesting piece of work was arrived at.  Good work!