Tag Archives: High School Art

Sculptural Paintings

Students were challenged to create an acrylic painting that was also a relief sculpture. They sketched their design on a canvas panel (gridding, if necessary) and built up areas with mat board covered with a layer of papier-mache’ before starting … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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Light-Capturing Cut Paper Designs

Students practiced cutting and folding pre-printed motif designs before coming up with interesting designs of their own. They worked on medium-weight white drawing paper which they divided into at least five 2-inch boxes. They left a border around the outer … Continue reading

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Oldenburg-Inspired Sculptures

Students (middle school and later high school) were introduced to the monumental sculptural works of Claes Oldenburg. Excited by the prospect of “supersizing” an ordinary object, students brainstormed to come up with ideas. Once they’d made a decision on which object … Continue reading

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