Hello Friends of Art with Korb! Mr. KORB welcomes you!
This week brought out a bit of technology issues here at home. The Chromebook battery seemed to have gotten hot and began to bulge on the old computer. I needed to shut it down and put it aside. Fortunately, Chromebooks are affordable and a new one is in my hands so I can try and catch up. Ok, what’s up?
6th Grade Artists are now beginning the unit with Clay! Woo Hoo! Keepsake boxes are in the works and the planning is starting this week. What is a keepsake? What do you want to keep safe? A small something from a loved one? A token from a good friend that has moved away? A souvenir from a vacation you took last year? These are all things that you might think about and are all good ones to build your ceramic keepsake box for. EXCELLENT IDEAS! We are planning on the ideas and getting our measurements begun. Templates and all. (Templates are paper shapes that are cut before the final slabs of Clay are cut – save time and effort for later!)
7th Grade Artists are still deep into Adobe Photoshop and non destructive photo editing and masking layers. The challenges are not only the use of Photoshop but also following along with the videos and attempting to stay on task while Mr. Korb works around the room to keep everyone on task and understanding the program and the process. Once one understands some of the process, the rest becomes a lot easier and can be used in MANY ways on MANY layers. More to come as we wrap this up next week. Then… ONTO CLAY!
8th Grade Sculptors are still working on the pottery wheel and watching a few artists online (and me) for more inspiration and tips. Thank you Florian Gatsby, Earth Nation Ceramics, and Jon the Potter (and Frank Korb) for the videos and helpful advice. There have been a good number of artists coming in during their lunches and making STRONG advances on the wheel. The only way to get better is to be on the wheel and practice. How many pots do you need to throw? “The first 10,000 pots are difficult and then it gets a little easier.” – Warren Mackenzie. Mr. Korb has about 7000 more before they get a little easier. How many do you have?
Once again, what are YOU doing in your studio? It is important that as an art teacher you are making art as well. Does that mean huge works and every day? Not necessarily, but it is important to practice our profession. (Just one artist’s thoughts.) The ideas that are in your head are ideas that should be made into art – big or small, long studio time or short. We need to be ACTIVE as artists! Keep making great work!
Here are all of our Studio EXPECTATION
6th Grade: Photography
Here are the 6th-grade semester Lesson Plans to show you what our day will look like.
We are into the world of Keepsake boxes and clay. What you put into the box is up to you! How you build it requires a lot of thought and consideration as well as a lot of practice and process. Let’s take a look at the process together.
Vocabulary? There is a lot in the process. Clay and ceramics, scoring and slipping, green ware and bone dry. Can you identify any of these terms?
How do you make strong ceramics works?
Here is the assignment for Photography
7th Grade: Visual Biography and Photoshop
Here are the 7th-grade semester Lesson Plans to show you what our day will look like.
Let’s keep this part of the post the same until next week… then we’re onto clay (we hope).
We all make photographs, we all have passions and interests, and we all have a silhouette. What can we do with those in PHOTOSHOP? We are about to find out.
Using Photoshop and the internet to gather images (or maybe you can gather some of your own) we are going to spend time working with layers and masking. This is a high end artowkr with some high end computer skills that you are going to learn (and master?)! Beginning with yourself we are going to trace and import and erase and layer and resize and the list goes on and on and on… excited? I hope so!
Not one of our artist’s works but this is an idea that can take you places! What do you think about this artist and what they are interested in? Let’s get editing and layering!
Visual Biography Assignment is HERE.
8th Grade Sculpture: Wheel Throwing and Slab Building
Here are the 8th Grade Sculpture semester Lesson Plans for you to see what our day will look like.
This post is the same as last week – the only thing that has changed is that the standards for height in the cylinder and a 4 is now 4″ versus 5″
As an artist for my entire adult life, this is what I have landed on for the past 5 years. This is how I start my day and end my day. My life and business partner do this work together and keep our little potter up and running in Korb Pottery. What the artists in the studio will be doing is the same… but maybe not as much or as large.
Starting with one pound of clay and working to pull up a cylinder is the goal. How hard can that be right? Yeah – right! The biggest challenge is going to be the centering, then the opening, then the pulling, and don’t forget to keep the arms locked and the hands in place, and don’t forget to breath. Wedging? No way am I going to try and teach that – well maybe a little. One pound of clay kids…
AND at the exact same time we are working on SLAB constructions of a work of architecture. Their homes or another work of architecture that is important to them. Maybe I’d choose a work of Brutalist Architecture from our nation’s capital – I LOVE that work. Basic techniques will be revisited AND the work will be on their own. Solve some problems, work it out, don’t let it dry out. Ugh. All that one has to remember.
- BELOW are the ceramics assignments
- Wheel Throwing
- NEW – Cylinder Formative Rubric – Thanks Joshua Simmons
- Slab Building
