The Dusty Art Room

It's the end of the trimester - that crazy whirlwind of scrambling to finish projects, grade and organize!  Scrambling to the finish line, check! Organizing, check! Grading- I avoid it like the plague... Part of my problem has been that no matter how good my intentions are, I can't seem to find time in the day to grade projects.  There's always paper to cut, supplies to organize, kids coming in for extra work time, displays to put up, a kiln to unload, a kiln to load, art club to prepare for, counters to clean, copies to make... The list goes on.  Then, there's the issue of lugging home all those projects to grade them since I can't find the time to do it at school.   One of my goals this school year is to be quicker on the turn around with grading projects and another is to create an online gallery of work for my students - so in an attempt to "kill two birds with one stone" I decided to try Artsonia.  Now, on the one hand it may seem that I'm only me...

What better way to spend your weekend than surrounded by close to 500 art teachers from all over the state?! The highlight of the conference was getting to hang out with MY middle school art teacher who inspired my career! I kicked off the conference by leading a workshop on Roy Lichtenstein inspired self portraits captured on Comic Book Camera.  It's always a bit scary presenting to you peers- especially when you are asking them to use technology, but the workshop was a huge success!  The teachers got right down to taking their portraits and editing them on this nifty app before transferring to 15" x 18" sheets of tag board and outlining and adding color.  To create Lichtenstein's trademark BenDay dots, we used a variety of stencils and honeycomb ribbon to get the desired mechanical look.  Here's a finished product from one of my students... The rest of the day was filled with workshops, food and fun!  Saturday I presented one of my favorite lessons inspired b...