Taking Photographs

This week, we took photographs for our Anti-Bullying Poster Campaign.  We reviewed the slogans we came up with last week, and used them as a guide for our photographs.  Students broke up into groups, as we to share three digital cameras.  Mrs. Luker and I went over what makes a good photograph.  We don't want to take "snapshots".  We are looking for interesting angles, closeups, and good compositions.  This allowed each of the students to take a turn using the camera and learning how to take good pictures and take turns being in the photographs themselves.

Mrs. Luker helping students with a photograph

Students taking a photograph in the school hall

Next week, we'll print out 8x10 copies of these photographs to help us decide which photographs we want to use, where and if they need to be cropped, where the text will go.  See you then!

Anti-Bullying Advertising Campaign

Barbar Kruger

We started a new digital/graphic design project this week.  To begin, we viewed a PowerPoint presentation to give us an overview of the artist we are studying as well as some student examples from Oliva Gude's Spiral Curriculum for high school age students.  Olivia Gude is an art educator in the Chicago area and was recently in Columbus.  Mrs. Luker and I attended a lecture of hers at Ohio State a few weeks ago and this was one of the projects that she talked about.  We both thought it would be a great project for the Art Enrichment students.  Obviously our demographics are different from inner city Chicago so we are making this project our own by coming up with an anti-bullying campaign for K-4th graders.  When completed, we will hang our posters in the halls of the school.

Student Work from Olivia Gude's Spiral Curriculum

We also talked about the work of Barbara Kruger, as we plan on making our posters in the style of her work.  Big, bold black and white photographs along with red and white type.  Short statements for big impact.

We began by talking about everyday advertisements and how they are designed.  Large pictures or graphics grab the attention of the viewer.  We talked about slogans and how they are usually short statements, no longer than 4 or 5 words.  To begin, we wrote sentences about bullying.  We wanted our message to be a positive one.  Not "Don't ____" but instead, giving the viewer something they can DO.  Here are some of the slogans that we've come up with so far: 

Be a friend (not a bully)

Stand up for yourself

Be peaceful

Tell somebody

Talk (it through)

Need a helping hand

Make a new friend

(Everyone) join together

Don't exclude... INCLUDE

Help a friend

Play with everyone

We're all friends

Everyone plays

Nobody's perfect

Let in not out

Aren't those great?  Once we got going, the slogans seemed to get better and better. 

Next time we meet, we'll start taking photographs to use with those slogans.  

We Finished the Sculptures!

Last week, most of us stayed a bit late and finished our labor intensive sculptures.  It was a lot of hard work, but I think they look great!  Here are a few examples.  All of the sculptures will be on display in the cases in the school hallway.