The Ratner School Art Program

We are all looking forward to our upcoming Spring Break and were busy creating and finishing projects in art. All the glazing has been completed on the K-6th grade ceramic work and the 7th-8th grade face jugs have finally dried out completely. We have been printing and painting this week and have almost filled the drying rack to the top several times this week. I hope you all enjoy a restful and rejuvenating break.

Over 40 shelves full of art

Kindergarten Art 

We are now in week 24 in the Art and Humanities program. While the students are learning about the spring equinox and continuing the study of Ohio, we learned about the Ohio illustrator Charley Harper. We looked at several examples of his work and notices how he simplified animal and plants to shapes and forms. We studied the illustration of the Ohio state bird, the cardinal, and named the shapes Charley Harper used to create his artwork. The students drew the shapes on different colors of construction paper and cut the shapes out. The pieces were glued on a sheet of watercolor paper and details were drawn on with a marker. On Thursday the students used watercolor paint to complete their work. If you are interested in learning more about Charley Harper, visit his website at https://charleyharperartstudio.com/.

I can feel the joy of this artist in this piece of art he created.

1st and 2nd Grade Art

We had so much fun printing our plates of the monster in a box project! The art room was a flurry of ink, squeals of excitement and many trials and errors. It was the best kind of chaotic energy, full of experiments, failures and successes. The students have decided that they want to write stories about the monsters they created and we will work with Mr. K and Ms. G to write in their classroom. After the stories are written, they want to put all the prints and stories together and make a book for the Ratner School library. I thought is was a fantastic idea and will do my best to help make it happen. We will continue working on the next step of the monster project on Monday.

1st pulled prints

Many more Monsters

Many Monsters

3rd and 4th Grade Art

We began a new project this week in art. They enjoyed the more immediate results of the landscape project and I wanted the students to have a quicker project to complete after the hard work they did on the ceramic unit. We began designing and sketching creatures that had at least five different elements to their design. Fur, metal, a head of a lion and a tail of a kangaroo, any combination of animal, vegetable or mineral could be used in the design of their creature. Attention to detail, form and use of imagination were the cornerstones of this project. The sketches will be transferred onto printing plates so the students can pull several prints of their image. They have created some wonderful designs and worked through several ideas. The 4th grade class began the drawing transfer this week and the 3rd grade will transfer their drawings on Monday.

An inside view of our kiln with the first glaze firing,

5th and 6th Grade Art

The final clear glaze was applied to the bobble head ceramic pieces and the first firing of three kiln loads is working as I write this update. I am so excited to finally be at this stage of the project and I know the students are equally anxious to see the results of their hard work. We continued working on the CVNP landscape project and many of the students are more than half way done with their work. I am pleased to see the exploration of new techniques and methods with their process and the spirit of experimentation.

Visions of spring from the Cuyahoga Valley National Park

                                          

7th and 8th Grade Art

We had a full week of art and nearly every student has begun mixing their paint colors for the landscape project. They are experiencing how difficult matching values and color intensity with acrylic paint can be. They are finding that a little color change goes a long way in mixing and they are showing improvement in mixing skills. I am encouraging them to find the overall tone or base color to lay down a field of color before they start their detail work. This seems logical, but it is difficult for students this age to see the "big picture" and do the ground work before the detail work is added. It is the process, not the product that we are focused on with this project.