Art Teacher Workshop @ the Frist with Renowned Potter: Regis Brodie

I just love getting to attend beneficial workshops and this was one of them! We all got the chance to present our own work! We learned all about Regis Brodie, his influences and his body of work. It was a great experience and towards the end of the workshop we made a Japanese tea bowl for a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. My favorite piece of information from learning about Japanese tea ceremonies was that no one speaks before, during or after the ceremony and once you leave the ceremony you are leaving with the understanding that could be the last time you ever see each other again. That seemed really beautiful to me.
Anyway, here are some photos I took while attending the workshop. Enjoy!

Below you'll see Regis Brodie and Mr.E being silly with some samples of our tea bowls.

Chihuly Tower Installation

We went outside today to spray our elongated armatures with clear gloss to add that extra 'glassy' look. Below are some photos of our outdoor adventure. I let some of my responsible students take turns being the "photographer". I think they did a nice job.

Lucky Find!

I bought one of my favorite books, "Roberto the Insect Architect", for $1.00 on half.com and you'll never guess what was on the inside!

Check it out...

It's signed by the author! And, best of all, she drew Roberto!

Chihuly Unit Continued....

My 1st and 2nd graders are exploring color through Chihuly as well. We too have learned about warm and cool color families. They are discovering how colors can work harmoniously together with this Chihuly-inspired project.

We looked at several images of Dale Chihuly's glass sculptures and especially at the Macchia series! They are enjoying learning lots of new vocabulary words too!

The first step in our Macchia sculpture project is creating an organic shape using a coffee filter.We are creating designs using warm and cool colors. . One coffee filter will show warm colors and the second will show cool colors.

After we have filled the coffee filter with designs, we wrap them around balls of aluminum foil secured with a rubber band. Each student then sprays their macchia forms with starch. We are getting ready to unwrap our sculptures, once they have dried, and we will be playing with composition to create a "Macchia Forest" with our forms. 

Okay, here's some of our "Macchia Forests"!

                                                (Macchia Forest and Drawing Wall)

Chihuly Unit!

We are diving into Dale Chihuly's artwork with our extraordinary unit written by fellow Metro art teachers! My 3rd and 4th graders have been creating "Chihuly Drawings". We started by reviewing two very important color families: warm and cool.  We looked at Dale Chihuly's drawings and made some sketches of our own. The students created their backgrounds using either cool colors or warm colors. We then drew our Chihuly-inspired organic forms on our dried backgrounds with oil pastels. We also used paint right out of the bottle to splatter lines and designs over our drawings to give them that extra "Chihuly touch"! . 

Once we finished our spontaneous splattering we signed our drawings with our "artist signature."

Our next endeavor will be a collaboration sculpture project. Each student will create a Chihuly organic sculptural form and we will attach them to a post being built by my wonderful fiance, Daniel. This will be an installation piece located somewhere in the school. We will research and decide on the installation location, inside or outside, and then we will document our installation process and product. 





Here's our beginning phases of the Chihuly Towers!

We are still working on these, but it's a great start!

How'd he do it??

My students are very curious about how these Chihuly sculptures are constructed and installed...so here it is, folks. Enjoy!

Dale Chihuly - Fire & Water time lapse