Warm and Cool Piet Mondrian- 8th Grade Project

My 8th graders art talents vary from amazing to down right pitiful. As a middle school art teacher, I do not grade on talent, I grade on the ability to follow directions, neatness, work habits and my expectations of their individual work.  I make sure that they learn the concepts and techniques, but their execution of the skills might not always be as wonderful as I would like them to be. 

I am one of the few full time elective teachers at my school, and that means that not all of the students in my class, actually chose my class.. I get students who 'forgot to turn in their choice form' at the end of the previous year, and so they get 'stuck' in my class because I have more sections, and therefore, extra spaces. I also have special needs students who are self-contained for the entire day, with the exception of their elective class.  So the outcome of my projects can vary greatly from student to student. 

This project we talk about the artist Piet Mondrian. We study his artwork and talk about his use of vertical and horizontal lines, a primary color scheme, and the creation of different sized squares and rectangles through the intersection of his lines. I begin every project with a powerpoint, prezi or adobe spark page that the students take notes from. 

At the start of this project, students learn and practice three colored pencil techniques: exterior emphasis, value, and texture as seen below. 

They complete a very small practice project before beginning the final project which I draw and photocopy for them to color and fully understand how to color the project. 

Then they choose a cartoon character and I print it for them. They practice drawing it in their notebooks and then they draw it on a larger scale by simply drawing from observation. I typically do not get the groans of "I can't draw" from this project because cartoon characters are fairly simple and as long as they get the features close to the likeness of the character, they are happy with the outcome. 

After the character is drawn, they use a ruler to draw vertical and horizontal lines to create a Mondrian-like artwork. They trace everything with sharpie before they begin coloring. The color scheme we use is the warm/cool grouping- they have to color their character with one set and the background with the opposite set of colors. 

They are required to use the colored pencil techniques throughout the process. 
I am always impressed with their final outcomes- enjoy!

This was done by one of my Learning support students, she used a light table to trace her printed characters

This artwork was also created by one of my Learning Support Students- she also traced the printed cartoon on a light table. 

This one was completed by one of my English Language Learners from Afghanistan. He speaks very little English, but thats one of the beautiful things about art- its an international visual language :)