Sunday, July 17, 2011

Art Advocacy

This is a great article defending the arts.

An Arts Education is Essential to Success

Grant Writing = Excitement...Anticipation...Wish Lists...Possibilities

Over the past couple of weeks I have been pouring over pages of information on screen printing machines and technology, have made phone calls to experienced artists and organizations and spent my time writing a grant for $10,000. Yes, $10,000! If this project is funded, myself and our tech ed teacher would receive enough money to set up our dream classrooms as far as technology goes, get to take our students on field trips to a printmaking studio, have an artist-in-residence come to our school, and create an in-house screen printing studio. I can't wait until the decisions have been made and to find out if our grant will be funded! It was certainly fun to create that wish list, but it will be so much more fun to have a classroom outfitted with such unique equipment for our students to create with...and now the waiting begins.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Sketchbooks


Who wants to waste a ton of their budget on less than stellar sketchbooks when the art room is crawling with paper - all kinds and colors of paper? So it is time to teach myself how to make my own. I'm going to go with the coptic or chain stitch binding method and have found a couple of good tutorials to demonstrate this technique. The best part is I already have all of the supplies, I can make it any size I want, the cover will be personalized and it can be as many pages as I see fit for each of my classes. Now to just be more consistent with having my classes use them...

Written and photographic tutorial

YouTube video tutorial