Once upon a time, I stopped painting. Frustrated that I couldn’t get my paintings to look “right” (read: real), I stepped away for a while.
Most of the artwork to which I’d been exposed was a realistic style so in my mind that was the kind of art that was good. When I was given the opportunity to learn and see more of art history and realize that there are lots of different styles I was able to loosen up and come back to painting.
This is my 5th year in my current teaching position and I have observed the majority of students working on paintings being very tight trying to force a realistic style. The students also struggled to work with acrylic quickly enough and ended up frustrated with trying to blend dried paint. One of my goals for introducing painting this year was to encourage them to loosen up, move more quickly, and understand their options for different styles and approaches.



The 2nd exercise was a simple technique sampler. Students folded their paper into quarters and made tiny paintings with different techniques in each section: palette knife, dabbing, scraping (using a piece of mat board), and sgraffito.

When the time came for students to begin their final paintings they had learned some new techniques to have at their disposal. I gave the themes of “object” and “shoes” as starting points but some branches off in different directions.
I feel like intentionally practicing techniques for loosening up, in addition to introducing different styles of art in the art genres unit made a big difference in the students’ confidence and willingness to try new approaches.
These paintings were created by a couple of freshmen boys who were not very comfortable with painting before.

Not many takers on watercolor, but the couple that used it did a nice job.
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This is the wall in our front office where I can display 10 16x20 inch paintings. |
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