Strategies to learn art by learning to generate original art ideas and empathy from Marvin Bartel Ed.D
Un-drawn Realities. In this sketch search, all drawings must be of something in the art room that no student in the class has ever seen in a drawing before. What do we overlook? What does the art teacher not notice? What is hiding in plain view?
Style variations. Students do self-portrait sketches using mirrors. Make some surreal, some expressionistic, some formalistic, and some realistic.
Capricious composition generation. Such as: activities that produce many accidents from which you have to make choices. i.e. drop five flat toothpicks and place a 35 mm slide frame over them to frame the best possible design. Hold it down tight and pencil in the negative spaces. Do this five times and rank them from best to worst designs.
Create a designs by creating transition. Draw something from nature from observation like the cross-section of an onion with some greens still attached, or an apple cut open to show the inside, the stem, and an attached leaf. Overlay the first drawing with thin paper and trace it slightly abstract. Overlay the tracing and trace the tracing slightly abstract. Repeat ten times, each time trying to end up with the design for a piece of clay, wood carving, a coffee table, a lamp base, a sculpture, or other art or craft product.
Unlikely juxtapositions. Change normal expectations. Hard things are soft. Large is small. Smooth is rough. Down is up. Inside is outside. Brittle is flexible. Light is dark. Natural becomes geometric. Manufactured goods grow on the farm. Numbers become animals. Dream world ideas are developed.
Transformation. What would a theme park look like if it is designed for house flies and maggots, or for butterflies, pupa, egg, and caterpillars? What would this classroom look like if it was made into apartments for homeless families? How would our classroom look if was changed into a prison? What if the part of the school would be changed into a petting zoo, a garden, a water garden? What if our school building would be made into a shopping mall or a computer factory? Is there an old abandoned building nearby, what could it be used for? What would happen if Wolf Point planted 1,000 trees, where should they be planted? What could be built on the roof of the high school building?
Translation. Create several small non-objective collage compositions that are based on the relationships that exist in the family of each creator. These collages must depend on the relationships of of color, texture, shape, value, and so on. Allow no subject matter so that you learn to consider formal elements instead of images to communicate the content. You are not required to share or tell about the basis for the composition so that you can confidentially use your real feelings.
Collaborate to Compete. Many of today's jobs require creative and productive teamwork and leadership skills. Form several teams for the purpose of generating more and better art ideas. Set up competition between the teams for the number and quality of ideas that they develop for art that is based on their own deeply held interests, feeling, experiences, and beliefs. What and how could art make the world in which they live a better world?
What if teams pass around their drawings, collages or, or assemblages as they work. They work on each other's work to develop enough ideas so that each team member can then redo one of the outcomes to make it into a personal cohesive composition that incorporates new ideas contributed by others on the team.
Conceptual art. Write and illustrate the imaginary history of a mysterious still life object (comic book style). What if a Granny Smith apple is drawn as a portrait of what Granny Smith must have looked like and what she wore the day she discovered the Granny Smith apple. Can a piece of driftwood be explained then drawn in terms of its life in a castle or some imaginary unrecorded prehistory. Design a still life that is represented by the molecular diagrams of the materials (molecules) present in the still life. What is the story of a stone age tool if it is illustrated at the moment of its invention? Can good and bad art be created and shown with a halo and devil or some other symbolic designation?
