K-4 Art!

Hello art loving families!

After the birth of her son, Maximillian Danger, on January 16th, Ms. Beverage has been on maternity leave, placing me as the long-term subsitute K-4 art teacher. I am so excited to be working with more students in the FCCS community, as I am already the 5-8 art teacher. For those of you who do not know me yet, I have been teaching at FCCS since 2015 after I graduated from Hood College with a degree in Art & Archaeology with a concentration in Art Education PreK-12. I have always loved all kinds of art - when people ask me what my "specialty" is, I generally have a hard time just choosing one medium because I love just about every 2-D media, but I do really enjoy drawing in charcoal and painting with oil. After a few really great internships with FCPS teachers at Governor Thomas Johnson Middle, Walkersville High, Centerville Elementary, and Windsor Knolls Middle School, I had a difficult time deciding which age of children I wanted to teach, which is why FCCS is perfect because it allows me to work with both elementary and middle school students every day.

Currently, each grade is in the middle of a project. Kindergarten is learning about line types in a project titled Love Lines, where they are combining learning how to draw hearts and different lines. First grade is finishing up their unit on Ancient Egypt (my personal favorite ancient culture) by working in teams to create a drawing of a life-size sarcophagus. Second grade is working diligently to use the grid technique to recreate a drawing of a Viking ship, and thidr grade is also using the grid technique to recreate a version of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Fourth grade is almost complete with their paintings of Van Gogh's Starry Night, where they are using his Post-Impressionistic painting technique to show movement within the artwork.

I look forward to teaching your children for the next several weeks! If you ever have any questions, please do not hesitate to send me an email.

Thank you,

Ms. Strasser

Greek Sculpture Update

This past week, fifth grade artists molded air-dry clay over top of their wire armatures. Students had so much fun with this portion of the project and it yielded great results! Here are some in-progress and final photos of the sculptures:

Throughout this project, students have overcome so many hardships - I am so proud of their hard work! These forty students have shown the most patience, diligence, and constancy in the last couple of weeks! I have heard feedback from students and have thought of new ideas that would have made this project even more successful. One student suggested that this solely be a wire sculpture project. I'm not opposed to that; the wire sculptures looked awesome and most of them stood up well. I know for next time that I need to purchase thinner wire so that it is easier to bend, or supply more tools to manipulate the wire with. We use air-dry clay at FCCS because we do not have a kiln in our building, but maybe next year I could talk with my art teacher colleagues and see if we could use a kiln in their school! I would need to buy proper clay and cut out the step of building the wire armature (since it would melt and explode), but the final sculptures would be sturdier this way. I also think that by dividing the clay into bags for each student ahead of time made the clay dry out quicker, resulting in all the cracks in the solid statues. I have thankfully not had any casualties yet, but as precaution, I'm going to apply a layer of mod podge over the sculptures to prevent any limbs from breaking off before students paint this week. 

Stay tuned for the final product in the next couple of weeks!

Greek Sculptures

Fifth grade artists have been showing great patience and working diligently the last two weeks while creating wire armatures for their Greek-inspired sculptures. First, they had to choose which Ancient Greek sculpture style they wanted to portray in their artwork: Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic. Next, they had to draw a rough draft in their sketchbook of either a person they knew, a Greek god or goddess, or an animal that displayed qualities of their desired sculpture style. Once rough drafts were completed, students took to using a variety of wire, pliers, and wire cutters to twist, bend, cut, and shape the "skeleton" for the inside of their sculpture. Next step is to sculpt on clay!

Here are a few excellent examples of the wire armatures: