Lorena Alvarez

Working in groups, students photographed each other moving diagonally through space on a straircase. In Adobe Photoshop they assembled those pictures into a collage that captured the sequence. This collage served a means to investigate the body in motion as well as the relationship between the body, the objects the surround and support it, and the space it inhabits.

This project calls for students to design a house for an artist. It is imagined to be a live/work space that serves those two purposes. The student did an excellent job of considering how the quality of an enclosure can inform the use of the space. You can see in the images that there are spaces that are more transparent or translucent than others. The juxtaposition of those spaces create a narrative. The first image shows a longitudinal section through the house, Sections are an important tool in understanding how our bodies relate to spaces we inhabit, and these do a great job of storytelling that experience.

I love trace paper, it is one of my favorite materials. It reveals and conceals so I am happy whenever we can use it as a tool for discovery. Before you can paint something you have to learn how to see it. Students used trace paper over existing images to discover the tones, values, and shapes that comprised a person, object, or landscape. Once they identified and outlined all of the parts with graphite, the image was transferred to a canvas. Students then used paint to explore the effect that light, shade, and shadow have on forms.

These sculptures were born from collages. Each student produced a conceptually driven collage and then imagined how that composition might take form in three dimensional space. Students first constructed individual pieces and then treated them as a kit of parts that they could (and did) assemble and re-assemble into different configurations. This process afforded them the ability to investigate ideas of balance, physics, space, composition, symmetry, and color.

Relief sculptures are a great way to get kids into the Z axis. In this project students broke down an image into layers and utilized the different properties of corrugated cardboard to express textures. They began by choosing a favorite album/album cover. It is so much fun to see the types of music and different genres they are interested in. I love when they choose artist that I like and when they introduce me to new music. This is a nice way to get to know more about your students and for them to create connections among themselves. After they settle on a cover the students are asked to imagine the image as a series of layers. They decide what is in the foreground and the background and everything in between. From there they build up or back, depending on the student and the design.

Dutch painter Piet Mondrian's love of geometry was the jumping off point for this project. Each student chose one of Mondrian's painting as a tool for investigating line, geometry, space, balance, proportion, and hierarchy. Armed with their own understanding of how these elements inspire a composition, the students designed a three dimensional object that adheres to or challenges that which they discovered in their analysis.

This assignment invites the student to investigate joints, or the way things are put together. Students have the opportunity to consider materials and connections. The conceptual framework for this exercise begins with diagramming a particular condition and it grew from there. The pictures here include exploded axonometrics (swoon) that illustrate how the individual pieces come together and the physical three dimensional constructs. Lastly, I included some of the diagrams (Adobe Illustrator) students made that fueled the projects.

This is a great exercise in texture, color, and layers. Since they begin by using their own names in the artwork, students feel an immediate sense of ownership. The assignment starts off with the development of a series of textures at different scales. Then each student chooses a color group and begins exploring. I caught a few students doing names that were not theirs. I asked who they where making them for and it turns out they were commissioned works! Yep, the kids were selling them, can't be mad at that.

It is amazing what you can do with 2 pieces of paper, a pair of scissors, and some glue. Students were given a large white rectangle and a smaller black rectangle. Through a process of cutting and pasting they are able to explore positive and negative space as well as balance and proportion. Fellow art teachers, this is a great quick project that can be adapted to students at various levels and with various abilities. You could do it in one or two days, depending on your love of process!

In an elective course at the Tyler School of Art, students entered the project through a song. Each student picked a favorite song and then analyzed it, breaking it down into parts that comprised a whole. They considered each instrument, the lyrics, the space between the beats, etc. The students created maps of the song that took into consideration how the elements of the song developed over time. Pictured here are their final constructs meant to be read from top to bottom. 

Each student chose one frame that captured a moment in a person's movement and illustrated it in charcoal. Together the drawings depict a sequence in a dancers choreography. Charcoal is a great medium for this exploration, it allows a student to express distinct qualities through texture and a way to express the nuance of light and shadow that provide context for a body in motion. The drawings were then photographed and assembled into a stop motion animation film.

One of my favorite aspects of this project is that students make their own looms. Learning to make things is empowering and it facilitates the idea within a person that they are not just a consumer of things but a producer as well. If you look closely at the cardboard loom pictured here you can see that each student draws the design of their wall hanging on the loom. Once they have a design in place they consider color as well as textures they can create with distinct weaving patterns. The history of weaving is so rich you can find precedent in various cultures, definitely check out the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop.