Art educators and administrators allowed a project to evolve based on the "street life" experiences of ordinarily invisible people. The goal was to create a space or number of spaces for celebrating the human spirit through art, music, dance, poetry, theater, and story while also providing a forum for exploring some of the social issues affecting…

This article describes a miniature painting project that allows students to research a master painter and then replicate the work on a smaller scale. This lesson focuses on the students' ability to learn to identify style, subject matter, themes, and content in painting through the study of historical paintings, and the application of various…

This article explores youth making media across genre practices. The author begins with a discussion of youth media arts, followed by a discussion of remix in the digital era. An exemplary video poem project from the San Francisco Bay Area is described to illustrate the importance of critical solidarity among youth. The multimodal design,…

In this postmodern era, artists have gone far beyond traditional and technical skills. In her own teaching practices, the author looks to implement practice of a twenty-first-century art educator that inspire students to develop creative and innovative thought processes while relating to the world around them. In this article, she encourages…

In this article, the author describes how her studio art students created their Pop art-style self-portraits. Students were each given a printout of a black-and-white picture of themselves that the author had taken with her digital camera. With this picture, students took tracing paper and traced a basic outline of their face, hair, and neck. They…

Visual art has been defined as a vehicle for expression or communication of emotions and ideas. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Contemporary artist HA Schult is an internationally renowned German artist who takes unwanted trash and transforms it into figures, creating large-scale art…

During her thirty-five years of teaching, the author has found that starting an introductory course with lessons that almost always guarantee success creates a strong foundation on which the course can be structured. It builds confidence and repairs the damage that may have been done to students who are timid or afraid of failing in their creative…

Each year, the first-year high-school art students at Surry County High School in Dendron, Virginia, complete a three-dimensional project that attempts to re-create an artifact from the Old Kingdom. In this article, the author describes how the students made canopic jars from recycled 2-liter soda bottles and newspapers for this year's art…

Creating a painting with texture is easy, although using heavy gel medium or modeling paste may be pricey ways to go about it. High school artists generally like making collages and mixed-media. In this article, the author suggests ways to capitalize on that interest with inexpensive fabric in a painting project.

The history of the photomontage spans artistic movements and political history. In the early twentieth century, Dada artists used the new media of mass-produced photographs to assemble collages that reflected their expression of the absurd. Russian Constructivists utilized their access to photographs and ability to quickly distribute completed…

Build, create, make, blog, develop, organize, structure, perform. These are just a few verbs that illustrate the visual world. These words create images that allow students to respond to their environment. Visual culture studies recognize the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world. This…

For many artists, visual representation begins with the creative exploration of real and personal experiences. The primary challenge in creating such introspective works is maintaining the ability to connect with a broader audience. For high school students specifically, tremendous pride manifests in the creation of artistic works that represent…

Australia's national arts curriculum has potential to realise the following benefits: cognitive, social, affective and curricular. This curriculum is designed for generalist and special arts teachers, but its delivery may be hindered by the prioritisation of high-stakes-tested disciplines and pedagogies, and reduced government funding to arts…

In this article, the author describes how students created a black-and-white nontraditional mandala. A variation could be using colored pencils with a specific color scheme, i.e. complements, analogous or monochromatic.

Gargoyles, grotesques, and chimeras are scary, mythical (and sometimes humorous) creatures that have functional, decorative, and spiritual significance in medieval architecture. In this article, the author describes how her ceramics students created contemporary versions of gargoyles, chimeras, and grotesque faces. (Contains 1 online resource.)