Carmel Rocks

To kick the school year off, every teacher and student picked a value on which to focus. They painted their rocks and then wrote their value on the their rock. All the rocks have been placed at our entrance in the Carmel Academy Rock Garden.

New Signs for the New School Year

Just a few new signs for the new school year...

Feel Good Color Landscapes

These landscapes were inspired by Art Teacher Cassie Stephen's Claire West inspired landscape lesson. The 4th graders looked at British contemporary artist Claire West's landscapes. She uses colors in unusual ways in hopes of making viewers happy when looking at her work. I love colour and enjoy exploring its contrasts and its vibrant and intense nature. In working in colour I like using colours that are often believed to not work together, in doing this I hope to break down the boundaries of what we should do and explore the freedom that is so often lost in art when we are no longer children.

The 5th graders created a background sky, horizon line and landscape using chalk pastels smudged with liquid starch. It was a little messy but fun and soapy smelling.It's a great way to enhance the look of the pastels and also ensure they are permanent.  Then they added large, medium and small painted fauna to create the illusion of depth in their compositions. 

Hanoch Piven Collaged Biography Portraits

In the art room, the 3^rd graders were introduced to the Israeli artist and illustrator Hanoch Piven who creates awesome collage portraits with assorted ephemera that is often related to the person he is recreating inspired by his art and the research they did on their chosen character, the students created mixed media portraits of their character. They drew and painted parts of it and also used computer images and other collage items like fabric, foam, sequins, buttons. 

Dale Chihuly inspired Installation

The whole school participated in this Dale Chihuly inspired installation. We used recycled plastic water bottles and salad bowls with acrylic paint and permanent markers. All the students watched a video  about Dale Chihuly and his DARING new styles of glass blowing and display. The water bottles were cut open and assembled into Chihuly-like chandeliers.  Other students decorated recycled take-out bowls and the flower shaped bottoms of water bottles which were melted to resemble Chihuly's seaforms and rotollos which were strung together into an additional chandelier.

#CarmelRISE feathers to Wings

For this year’s opening art project, the student’s learned about the contemporary street artist Kelsey Montague. She paints Interactive Street Art, mostly wings, for people to photograph themselves between. Each student made a special feather in age appropriate media that were compiled into a beautiful set of wings. These wings represent the Carmel Academy Hawk and our goal of #RISE.

(Respect, Integrity, Safety, Effort)

New Year, New Mindset & Motivation

I was inspired to start 2017-2018 off with new inspirational Bulletin Boards based on the book THE GROWTH MINDSET COACH: A Teacher's Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve and Thinking Like an Artist (and Carmel Academy's 20th Anniversary theme of DARING).
{thanks @CassieStephens for the cute paintbrush tutorial!}

Thinking like an artist means...
I will try.
Mistakes help me learn and improve.
What can I do to make it even better?
I'm going to train my brain and hands to do art.
This will take time and effort.
I'm going to figure out how s/he is doing it. 
This is going to take some time.
I'm going to be present.
I'm willing to listen to shared ideas.