Today class finished up painting their alter-egos. They got to work quickly and were very engaged the whole class, one of the studio habits of art. As I went around, I decided to focus on four students this time so I could capture their learning better and really get in-depth observations of how they went from process to process.
I am going to start with one of the students that isn’t too fond of art and who has a little attention span. He likes to wander around the room and trying to get conversations about his work is a little difficult because he doesn’t like to talk about his work or his processes but is evident that his work is very creative!
This was his initial caricature painting when he started last week. When I first talked to him he “made superman drinking coffee’ and ‘ this is his employer,” pointing to the lower right corner. I asked him why he made the employer so small, an art question dealing with scale. He said, ” the employer is smaller because super-man is more powerful.”
The beginning of painting his caricature
When I caught up with him this time, He had the same employer idea but this time he said that “superman was in a cave.” When I tried to ask why he made another artistic choice of putting his employer in the corner of the page, he became defensive almost like I had cornered him by asking him questions about his artwork and abruptly said “I don’t know and walked off.” I realize that this was the extent to which a child can be pushed. We have learned that as art-educators there is a line between pushing and letting them be comfortable in their process. I realize that this student is a little harder to talk to but that the evidence of his creative thoughts definitely come out in his artwork.
Middle stages of his painting
“Superman in a cave” the final stage
The next student is one of the most diligent students in the class. She gets concepts and is very bright, but extremely shy. She clearly understood the concept of caricature because in the first weeks observing, she was one of the first to sketch a big head. Catching up with her this week, i saw that she understood how to exaggerate to emphasize features and that she took the assignment in a little bit of a different way. When I talked with her she said she exaggerated the eyes not because it was going to be a trait of her alter-ego but because she herself had big eyes. This is where the idea of fluency comes in. We have learned that if we can tell as teachers that they understand the assignment but want to manipulate it a little differently that’s perfectly okay because behind that choice was still high creativity.
The artistic choices she made had to do with reflection and re-intention, two processes in the creative method. She reflected on how her face didn’t match her body from last week’s portrayal, and said, “I think I might re-do the body to match the face.” She changed the color to match her intent. In the beginning Eileen and I had wondered whether she did this on purpose to incorporate her skin tone with her peer’s opposite skin tone to portray the inclusion she feels or whether this was an accident. She said she would repaint the body to match the face which was a mixture of the two. Instead of having a clear mark of black and white skin tones, she created this hybrid red color for her alter-ego’s skin tone which show the inclusion or mix of the two in a new way.
The first stage of her alter-ego with two different skin colors
This student has a hard time coming up with her own ideas for her own work and seems to copy everyone else’s around her. It is extremely difficult to talk to her about her work because every response is “I don’t know.” She seems reliant to talk to Eileen or I so it is hard to see her creative process. However, this week was a break through. She talked with me more than she ever had and I was able to see why she was making some of the artistic choices she was. It felt really good to achieve this. She seemed more comfortable than she ever had! I asked her what is exaggerated and she first said, “I don’t know…um her head.” I then asked, “Why is that?’- and she replied, “because she’s smart, she knows things that haven’t even been invented.” This was so exciting to see why she was making the choices she was. She also let me know that the brown dots on the top of her head were buns and not ears. I asked her why she depicted ‘LOVE’ on her alter-egos dress and she was able to tell me it was just because “I have a dress that has LOVE on it.”
Painting the hair using black lines
Although she didn’t verbalize it, it was evident that she was adding black lines to create texture for the hair. Eileen had gone over how to paint different lines to create different texture. I think this sunk in and created a non-verbal artistic choice.
Her completed caricature painting
Even though, I couldn’t get answers on why she made the choices to purposefully reflect traits of her alter-ego, this was the first time I was able to talk to her about why she had made something. It was very rewarding to finally reach this student and get a little information out of her. She seemed to like creating which is the bottom line most important thing!
This week she moved on to the face and the background.
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