Been a while, eh? All I can say is life happens. Just like the moon waxes and wanes, so it goes. Been busy with a million things but creative endeavors have been creeping back in again. Most recently, this has been through a couple of classes I taught at Puget Sound Community School.

The first was a fun drawing class designed to teach the value scale by way of learning about the art of Chuck Close and then emulating his grid portraits technique. I can't lay claim to this lesson plan though. Just do a google search for "Chuck Close portraits" to find many variations listed. We watched a slide show and movie about his life and work, then I took pictures of each student and posterized these in Photoshop, reducing the number of values to 4 or 5. Next, I printed these out and we gridded them and transferred the images to a larger piece of paper to begin the drawing. Each square on the grid was assigned a value (dark, medium dark, medium light and light) and the students would then do a doodle drawing in the squares. The darker the value of the square, the denser the drawing would be. Here's a demo I worked up to show the process --

Lots of little squares to fill in! I should have put more thought into that before choosing such a large piece of paper to transfer the drawings to. I think in total there were nearly 400 squares to do.. poor kids. It's so true -- work like this requires a very specific artistic temperament. You have to enjoy doodling (perhaps I should say ENDLESSLY doodling?). Fortunately, one of my students had it in her and found the whole project very inspiring. She completed a wonderful drawing which she's planning to give to her Mom for Christmas.

Her finished work here. Amazing, no?

For week two I switched gears from 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional work, doing a class on plaster masks. Though I don't have pictures from the first two days of class, we spent them paired in two's, as students would place wet plaster bandages on their partner's face to create the base of the mask. On day three we began the process of smoothing and refining the masks as well as adding sculptural embellishments like large cheekbones or protruding noses. Here the kids are doing just that --

The last two days of the class were scheduled for painting and finishing. The rest of the photos here showcase some of that process as well as a few of the finished (or work-in-progress) masks. The class itself was a big success and all were engaged for the whole process. I think the work speaks for itself --