Wednesday 12:30-3:30, Friday 12:30-3:30
This week, the IB students continued working on their research in coming for the exams, and the AP students worked on larger pieces for their concentration, while the Beginning Painting class worked on making greyscale works, particularly working on self-portraits and using value scales to recreate black and white photographs.
One of the Painting class students I spoke to was interested in pursuing college art education, but doubted that he could make a living without being in advertising and graphic design. I listed a number of venues that he could feasibly make money in, particularly regarding his style as somewhere in between fine art and illustration. Another student showed me a number of works he had created in Blender, a 3D rendering program, and translated his mental process from 3D and how that affects how he makes work in 2D. Students drawing themselves were often frustrated by its difficulty and had a tendency to think of drawing as a whole rather than breaking it down, and focusing on detail before structure – ie drawing each strand of hair rather than the hair’s shape, thinking of facial structure as one shape rather than many together.
Many students working on their concentration were frustrated with the use of new materials, or excited to work on a much larger scale than normal. A student with a cartoon-like style made a large graffiti-like painting, and the majority of the other large-scale paintings (2 to 4 foot works) had a graffiti feel as well. A student who was struggling to find new formats for his collages, and I suggested he consider the art object, which he seemed very excited about. This class has a startlingly high number of people who do papercraft, which leads me to believe there was a previous project that introduced this to them, but each student handles the format differently (stencil, background no background etc).