The Dusty Art Room

In November, Art club students created portraits for 10 Colombian children through a wonderful non-profit organization, The Memory Project.  The organization helps bring joy to children all over the world by bringing these hand-made works of art to children who have been orphaned, neglected, abused or are living in extreme poverty.   In return for the artworks, the organization creates a video that captures the celebration of the children receiving their portraits.  This year, they partnered with students from the University who dressed up as superheroes to help deliver the portraits.   Here's the email we received after sending in our portraits:  Hi Carissa! Your portraits for the children in Colombia arrived in the mail, and they are wonderful!  Thank you so much.  These are such sweet gifts. Really precious keepsakes for these small kiddos. We'll be bringing these to the children in early December, and I'll look forward to sending you the ...

Hester art club students were stretching their global awareness by creating portraits for children in Colombia who are living in orphanages.  The students wanted to use their artwork to bring a smile to other's who are living in difficult circumstances.  It is important to note that these children are well cared for. The Memory Project has been around since 2004 and has delivered 90,000 portraits to children in 42 countries!  The wonderful team at the Memory Project makes the process easy for teachers and students.  In a few weeks we will receive a video that captures the delivery of the portraits - it always brings tears to my eyes the joy we are able to help create!  Check out this wonderful organization HERE . Art club students also worked to create portraits for Syrian refugees - and I will share those once they are completed - the deadline isn't until January.  Here are some of the portraits we created and some of the work in progress.  As you...

What better way to spend your weekend than surrounded by close to 500 art teachers from all over the state?! The highlight of the conference was getting to hang out with MY middle school art teacher who inspired my career! I kicked off the conference by leading a workshop on Roy Lichtenstein inspired self portraits captured on Comic Book Camera.  It's always a bit scary presenting to you peers- especially when you are asking them to use technology, but the workshop was a huge success!  The teachers got right down to taking their portraits and editing them on this nifty app before transferring to 15" x 18" sheets of tag board and outlining and adding color.  To create Lichtenstein's trademark BenDay dots, we used a variety of stencils and honeycomb ribbon to get the desired mechanical look.  Here's a finished product from one of my students... The rest of the day was filled with workshops, food and fun!  Saturday I presented one of my favorite lessons inspired b...