High School: Weaving ancient expression with personal exploration
Over the past two weeks, students in Mrs. Duquette’s Creative Crafts class connected with one of the world’s most ancient and enduring forms of human expression: weaving.
Having considered warm versus cool colors, students drew two compositions, one in each color group, for the purpose of weaving them together into a pattern. Following this more creative phase of their project, they engaged in precise measuring and cutting to produce a paper loom and weaving strips.
While skillful weavers can plan and envision their patterns with great precision, for our intrepid paper weavers their exploration was more organic and the results a pleasant surprise.
Middle School: A different kind of selfie
Sixth-graders in Mrs. Allen’s Related Arts class are using their yearbook photos to create mixed-media portraits of themselves.
Born into the age of selfies, you might think middle schoolers would be perfectly comfortable drawing their own self-portraits. Instead, they expressed much discomfort and clearly differentiated the experience from photographs and mirror images of themselves.
“It’s a very interesting experience,” said Matty Kucera. “Creating a picture of yourself is very different from seeing yourself in a photograph. It makes you look at yourself in a different way.”
The portrait projects involve tracing, dividing the portrait into quadrants, and rendering each in a different media: charcoal, color-pencils, oil pastels, and acrylic paint.
A selection of these portraits will be featured in the spring art show.