Artist of the Month March 2015 - Vicky Nguyen

At the end of every month a student who has gone above and beyond in class is selected as the AIS Artist of the month where they are presented with an award and have their artwork framed and displayed in the main lobby. For the month of March, our AIS Artist of the Month was Vicky Nguyen for her excellent and creative work on her value scales project. She did a great job integrating 10 different values into her creative composition!

Mandalas

7th Graders this week have been learning about the Buddhist and Hindu tradition of Mandala making and what they symbolize and their deep significance within both religions.

We started off with a clip from the 2011 photo-documentary 'Samsara' which shows Tibetan Monks creating a sand mandala.

After we talked more about Mandalas I showed a second clip from the movie which shows the monks destroying the Mandala only moment after completion. Students were amazed and in awe to see the monks so easily destroy something beautiful, but understood that it was a sacred ceremony in their beliefs and traditions.

We started working on the project with a practice worksheet and as we started on that each student came up one by one to add to a class mandala on the whiteboard. Below is a stop-motion video I put together of each student coming up and adding to it during class time:

7th Grade students just began outline their Mandalas today and soon will begin coloring them in and finishing them up. Here are some pictures of the process:

More to come soon!

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới ! After a nice Tet holiday students are back in school and starting up some new projects in art class. 8th Grade students are just starting the first part of their drawing unit with their "Creative Value Scale" project.

This week students learned about different shading techniques and practiced pencil control to achieve different values. For the project they were challenged to create a composition which incorporates a 10 step value change within the drawing.

Once they finish their 10 values within the drawing it is up to them how they want to finish their artwork and they can use any materials they wish too. Here are some pictures of students working from this past week!

Romero Britto Projects

Here are the 6th grade Romero Britto artworks all finished up - check them out!

Spongebob by Linh

  Breakfast by Yumi

  Gundam Wing by Hai

  Alice in Wonderland by Quinn

 Nemo by Nemo

Adventure Time by Trang

  Oshawatt By Thuy

 Smurfette by Dan

 Pink Panther by Nina

 Penguin by John

 Darwin by Le

Donald Duck by Duc 

Doraemon by Thai

Olaf by Tom 

 Turtwig by David

Wall-E by Tom T.

AIS Artist of the Month

Every month at AIS one student who goes above and beyond in Art Class is selected as the AIS Artist of the Month. Winning this award gets your artwork framed and displayed in the school and the student presented with a certificate during our end of the month assembly. Last December we had our first Artist of the Month of semester 2, Thy Pham, for her Romero Britto Pop Artwork of Tinker Bell. Check it out!

Zentangles

This week 8th graders put the finishing touches on their Zentangles! Here are some pictures of the finished work - they really came out stunning!

By: Vicky, Mickey and Alice N.

By: David L., Andy T., Gwen and Kathy

By: Dewey, Karen, Melody and David L.

By: Selena, Jerry, Anna and Minh

Keith Haring Symbolism Artwork

7th Grade students are nearing completion this week with their Keith Haring Symbolism group paintings. For this project, we started off by learning about the life and artwork of Keith Haring and his use of pictographs as a visual language within his artwork. His art was heavily loaded with symbols and imagery that told a story. We even compared some of his the vases he created to ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic sculptures and most students had trouble telling the two apart!

Egyptian Hieroglyphics                                                         Keith Haring Pictographs

                                      

For our first step, we discussed what symbols are and how we use them to represent things sometimes literally and sometimes for ideas and concepts. For example, a heart shape we may say is a literal symbol of a heart - but conceptually it represents the idea of love.Students were then challenged to create their own unique symbols which represented ideas and concepts that they would use in their artwork. We also warmed up each day by reversing the process with students challenged to create visual symbols for 4 different ideas I presented to them.

After we spent time creating symbols, students were put into groups of three and challenged to create a large size mural design incorporating symbols based around a theme the group agreed on. Here are some pictures of what they are working on in class so far! 

Students discussing their theme, ideas, symbols and beginning to draw out their plan

Next, we outlined with marker to to separate and finalize each symbol. After that we were ready to paint!