Pip: Art With Korb, where the first quarter of the school year has apparently already happened, whether any of us were ready or not.
Mara: fjkorb's latest post covers a lot of territory — photography, soft pastels, printmaking, and clay — and the throughline is how much the process matters, not just the product. Let's start with what Week 9 actually looked like across the grades.
Week 9: A Quarter Down, Clay, Cameras, and Pastels
Pip: By the end of nine weeks, students have moved through watercolors, markers, portraits, cityscapes, and interiors — and now each grade is stepping into something that feels distinctly like a new phase. The question the post is really asking is: what does it mean to let the process lead?
Mara: The post is direct about that priority. On the subject of products versus process, it reads: "YES the products are important and so is the process (perhaps process is more important – YES – process IS more important – ALWAYS)."
Pip: That's not a throwaway line buried in the intro — it's the framing for everything that follows. Centering clay, running a print through a 1970s press, uploading photos for the first time: none of those go smoothly on the first try, and that's exactly the point.
Mara: The 6th graders are in the digital lab now, working with Camp Snap cameras — shooting close-ups of animals and the environment, then editing in Apple Photos on the Mac lab computers. The post notes the biggest challenge last week was simply logging in: remembering email addresses, capitalizations, spaces in passwords.
Pip: Which is a very honest thing to lead with. The art is almost secondary to the login screen, and somehow that's not discouraging — it's just accurate.
Mara: For 7th grade, the soft pastel unit wrapped up with something genuinely unusual: students laid their pastel drawings onto a 1970s printing press, placed dampened watercolor paper on top, and ran it through. The pressure transferred the pastels in reverse onto the watercolor paper.
Pip: A monoprint made from a drawing that was already finished — the press as a one-shot collaborator.
Mara: The post acknowledges the results were a surprise, and not always in the expected direction. Wolf Kahn's pastel landscapes are referenced as an inspiration for the color work, and the post is candid that some colors transferred better than others.
Mara: Then there's 8th grade, which has been waiting two years for this: the potter's wheel. The post lists the sequence — centering, opening, pulling, trimming — and adds that the real test of patience is what comes after: waiting for pieces to dry before firing and glazing.
Pip: Alongside the wheel work, 8th graders are also building slab bas-relief sculptures of their homes or another meaningful piece of architecture. Two simultaneous clay projects, both demanding, both new.
Mara: The post frames that combination as a deliberate departure from previous years — specific product goals alongside the open-ended process experience. It's a harder ask, and the post says the instructor is "just about as excited as they are."
Pip: Which tracks. Enthusiasm and mild terror are basically the same feeling at the start of a ceramics unit.
Mara: Process over product, across every grade, every material — that's the throughline the whole quarter keeps returning to.
Pip: Clay, cameras, and a printing press from 1970. Next time, we'll see what the second quarter brings.
