Category Archives: Lesson Plans
Acrylic Paintings – Hudson River School Theme
High school Art students created landscape paintings in acrylic, featuring scenes from the school’s campus. They were encouraged to use their own photographs as reference. The art history connection with this unit included a study of Hudson River School artists, … Continue reading
Decorative Painting
Students practiced the techniques of “one stroke” painting, using resource materials by popular decorative painters, such as Donna Dewberry and Priscilla Hauser. Additional resources included a wide variety of books on decorative and “folk art” painting, and an attractive display was set up … Continue reading
Watercolor Fall Leaves
Students painted small watercolors of fall leaves before starting on acrylic paintings. This exercise helped them with observational drawing, and with color mixing and color matching, as they were using real leaves as reference.
Screen Printing using Transparency Film Stencils
We used Mask-Ease for most of our screen printing projects, but we also used printer transparency film to create reusable stencils. In addition to being reusable (unlike the Mask-Ease which had to be removed from the screen and discarded after … Continue reading
Screen Printing with High School Students
After I learned the basics of screen printing by attending a one-day workshop, and after introducing screen printing to my middle school art students, I was ready to include this unit in my high school art ed curriculum. We used … Continue reading
Screen Printing with Middle School Students
After attending a one-day workshop on screen printing, I was ready to introduce my students to this fun art form. I ordered Mask-Ease (which is still available on Blick Art Materials), quart containers of water-based Speedball fabric inks in 4 … Continue reading
Screen Printing Workshop (For Adults)
In November 2008, I attended a workshop on screen printing at our local community college. As an art teacher, I was always looking for new and exciting projects for my students, and I thought this would be a lot of … Continue reading
Printmaking Demonstration by Mary Azarian
Mary Azarian–recipient of the 1999 Caldecott Medal for her artwork in the children’s book “Snowflake Bentley”–visited students at my school in March 2002 to demonstrate her woodcarving and printmaking techniques. She began her demonstration by showing the wood and the … Continue reading
Handmade Paper
Our basic materials for papermaking included a blender, two dishpans, two 8″ x 10″ stretcher frames covered with fine nylon screen, paper that we salvaged from various recycling bins around our school, sponges, towels, and newspapers. Before starting this unit, … Continue reading
Torn Paper Portraits
As a short-term project, students created torn paper self-portraits. A picture was taken of each student and it was abstracted in Photoshop using the cut-out filter. This filter breaks the image down into specific values and students chose the number … Continue reading