Anti Bullying Poster Campaign Live

Over the past couple of weeks, we finished our anti-bullying campaign posters.  

After taking our photographs, it was time to download them to the computers and crop them.  

Mrs. Frambes had our posters printed to 18 x 24 size at the local Kinkos.  The following week, we laid out the slogans on our posters.  We created our text in Word, and printed out the blocks of type.  Then, we cut out our type.  Some of the designs worked better with letters cut out one by one. 

Some of them looked better by cutting out each word and pasting it on to the poster.  

We kept the look and feel of Barbara Kruger's artwork, but also created our own personalized anti-bullying messages for Kindergarten through fourth grade.  We hung the posters in the halls and in the cafeteria.  

This morning, two students presented the posters to the school in the morning announcements to make the rest of the students aware of our campaign.  I went around the school to take photographs of the posters and Mrs. Carother's class was taking a walking tour of the posters to talk about each one.  I thought that was pretty cool!  I got lots of compliments from other teachers about the posters.  The whole idea behind an advertising campaign, is to have it noticed and for it to have an impact.  These really do have impact!!

If you'd like to take a tour of the photos, please click HERE.  

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.