Exploring Visual Design Part 3

This is not the best image...
I have been a little hesitant to take photos of high school student work.
I try to be relatively anonymous about who I am and where specifically I post from etc, but I know that with just a little detective work, someone could figure it out. Its not that hard.
When I taught middle and elementary school, I felt relatively safe posting student work. They probably wouldn't find me online, nor really care that I posted their artwork. But now that I teach high school... if they really wanted, they'd find me online. (Heck, they see me in the grocery store and the football games!)  And I think that they'd take a little more ownership over their work than my little ones.
Its a conundrum that I will try to contest this year.

The image above was selected to be in our miniscule art show last spring. It is an example of organic shapes and curved lines, versus geometric shapes and angular lines.

After our exciting Elements and Principles Memory game, we started very basically with line.
We looked at slides I made from Exploring Visual Design, about line quality and line personality. I tried to reiterate the difference between outline and contour line with this exercise created by my predecessor.

We also did a few studies of our hands and shoes using contour line.
Next, students designed as many words as possible on the following sheet, also created by my predecessor but adapted by me.

The following class we talked about how an area enclosed by a line is a shape. There are also two basic classifications of shapes: organic and geometric. Students then designed two images, one using organic and curved lines, the other using geometric and angular lines. The opening image is an example from last year. At this point, almost three weeks in, students were itching for some freedom. I was pretty impressed with their creativity and even more happy that this was a great opportunity to simply demonstrate gained knowledge.

Exploring Visual Design Part 4 will be an exercise in positive and negative space.