Finally getting around to writing this looooong overdue post about our beginning of the year school-wide collaborative project.

I always start off the school year with a school-wide collaborative project. I took the opportunity to talk about how we as a school are united and a team yet there is still variety amongst us. We talked about how unity and variety could be seen in each classroom and how this would happen with each quilt piece. Although 20+ students from each class used the same colors, no two quilt-squares turned out exactly the same.

Then we took a look at Corinne Sovey's quilts. I was introduced to her work by Don Masse over at shinebritezamorano and he did an awesome collab project based on her work as well! When looking at her work, students noticed that she often limited herself to a particular color palette and often repeated the same shapes over and over. Corinne is also a graphic designer who creates all of her own patterns that are then printed on to fabric to be used in her quilts.

I gave each class three different colored sheets of paper to choose from. The markers and crayons that they could use was also limited to those colors. After each class, I would remove one color and put in another color. This makes for a gradation across the finished work.

This was by far our longest collaborative project at about 40 feet long!

Gotta give a huge shout out to Don Masse over at shinebritezamorano.com for this project idea.

I finally got this beauty hung up so I thought it deserved a new blog post. I always start off the school year with a school-wide collaborative project. I took the opportunity to talk about how we as a school are united and a team yet there is still variety amongst us. We talked about how unity and variety could be seen in each classroom and how this would happen with each quilt piece. Although 20+ students from each class used the same colors and shape (triangles), no two quilt-squares turned out exactly the same. This year, we studied Libs Elliott. She is a contemporary artist who uses a computer program to randomly generate designs that she then turns into quilts. Each student created a square that would be used on the quilt. I also switched one color each class so it made a nice transition through the rainbow.

My goal for this school year was that I wanted to have our very own art show at Harmony. I think that it's important for students to have that opportunity to display their work in a professional manner, similar to a working artist. I chose to have a self-portrait themed show so each grade focused on a different artist. I was also lucky enough to partner the art show with Team Harmony's end-of-the-year carnival which always draws in a large crowd.

I partnered with a super awesome company called "Artome." After setting up a date and time, they shipped me some paper to make artwork on. You can also make your artwork on 9x12 paper and just hot glue it to Artome's paper (which is what I did). You have to fill out a color slips for each student with their basic information. I sped up the process by printing shipping labels with the information on them so all I had to do was slap it onto the artwork. After all that was done, I stuck the artwork back in the box and shipped it back to Artome. Artome then matted and framed all of the works of art. On the day of the show, a representative from Artome showed up a couple hours before my show and put up stands to hang the artwork from. Parents then had the opportunity to buy their students' work for $25 ($19 to Artome and $6 to the Art Department as a fundraiser). At a typical show 20-25% of the works of art are sold. We sold 45% of our artwork!!! I'm so lucky to work with parents who support the arts! My hope is that we can use this money to make a mural next year in the school! At the end of the show, the Artome rep took down all of the artwork. A couple days later, they shipped the remaining artwork back to me to hand back to the students.

I can't thank Artome, Team Harmony, and the Milton community/parents enough!

I FINALLLLLLY got the beginning of the year collaborative project hung up. For the first day of art, everyone was asked to decorate 3-4 popsicle sticks. We talked about how small, plain, and ordinary a popsicle stick was. But when everybody contributes several of them, those simple popsicle sticks become something much more complex.