Middle School Surrealist "Handscapes"

For this project I showed my students videos about Dalí. They learned how he was influenced by his dreams and subconscious. They learned that many of the anthropomorphic forms in his paintings that resemble large rocks are based on rocks he actually saw in the landscape where he spent much of his childhood.

For the assignment they used their hands in a similar way that Dalí used the rocks - they drew them and then changed them into something else while still allowing them to be hand like.

Here are the terrific results:

Our board!

Afrem

Aram

Danila

Expressionist Pastel Drawings Have Feeling

Inspired by a fellow art instructor here at Ribét - thank you Mr. Impert! - I taught a mini-lesson on Expressionism to my high school art class. We looked at Van Gogh, Munch, Pollock, and other Expressionists to see how the line quality, color, and feeling differed from more constrained and realistic paintings. Then the students chose from magazine images and were instructed to make an expressionistic drawing inspired by the photo. Here are some of the amazing results: