Week 15: May 6-May 12

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

My last and final journal! I actually will be continuing my work at the Residential Treatment Center for another couple of weeks because I want to make sure that I can finish up their final project with them. I have loved this placement so much that I want to possibly speak to Carmen about maybe coming in and doing a visiting lesson for an independent study. We will see! I am excited to see what the future holds with this experience.

This week the students started to paint their clay heads and make backdrops. I found an app on the iPad that the students will then carry on to draw on top of their images that they take. I got to teach some of the students a bit about how to mix paints and a bit of color theory which was very fun for me. I love color theory a lot so I have been having a lot of fun this past week. I have some images of the already painted heads and I cant wait to see what the students come up with. So far everything looks great!

Week 14: April 29-May 5th

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

This week my students got started on crafting their clay heads! All of them got really excited to get started on this project because they all wanted to work with clay. While in class, I found an iPad app that would allow the students to draw on top of their photos. This is so that the students can do the same technique as I did on my past project! Here are some photos of the works in progress before we get started on painting.

Week 13: April 22- April 28

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

I am super excited because I will be starting another lesson at the residential treatment center this week on 3D illustration. I brought in my sculptural illustration project for the students and everyone wanted to make one so thats what we are going to do. Carmen has air dry clay that we will use to sculpt the heads and since the students are working on photography, they have the skills to photograph their characters and create backgrounds for them. I recorded a demo video that I will have linked below. I plan to speak about what I am doing to the class while they watch this.

Week 12: April 14th- April 21st

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

This week Amabelle started her lesson with the kids when I wasn’t there about animation! I am so excited about this lesson because I was never taught anything about animation until I got to college and Amabelle did some peer teaching. It’s a really fun subject and Amabelle is super clear and prepared when teaching.

It’s a really fun project. Some students are amazing animators. I of course downloaded the app and got to play with it which was very fun and I made a little animation while the kids were working.

Carmen wants me to make a little lesson without a lesson plan to do before I leave. She wants it to be pretty simple and engaging to give the kids a break when they are done animating. I am not sure what I will do yet but I am going to think about it and see where I get.

Lastly, I got in contact with Kelley and I think I am going to go with hir on May 21st to Franconia to watch hir teach.

Week 11: April 7th- April 13th

I was unable to make it to the treatment center this Monday but then we had a surprise snow storm that cancelled my Thursday and the Friday gathering! So that is a total of 3 hours that got cancelled by the school. This gave me a bit of time to work on some other things. I finished that big clay illustration that I had been working on which I actually made quite a few changes to based on what the art director said.

Carmen wants me to come up with a small project to do while I am still around at the treatment center so I have to start thinking about that. Other than that, there is not much else to report

Week 10: April 1- April 6

This week was spring break and the end of the quarter for my students at the residential treatment center. I didn’t go there this week because there was no school but on Friday of this upcoming week the students are having something called, Friday Gathering. Friday gathering is a bit of a tradition where students get together and basically do a talent show. For this upcoming Friday gathering, students will be showcasing their stop motion pieces to the class. Even though I don’t typically go on Fridays because I have my internship at Light Grey Art Lab but I think I will go late so that I can attend the Friday gathering. My placement at the residency is coming to an end soon and I am trying to savor every moment. I feel really connected to my students and I am going to be so sad to leave.

As for this journal I am going to talk a bit about my internship and some of the work I have been doing outside of teaching. I feel that all of my work relates to teaching and so it is important to share.

I am currently an intern at Light Grey Art Lab. Light Grey is an illustration gallery that really focuses on artistic connection and the importance of community in the art world. Not only are there shows awesome and take in international art but they have a podcast, host workshops and do travel programs that brings artists from all around the world to a different location, like Iceland or Yellowstone, to learn from each other. I work pretty directly alongside the gallery manager there on preparation for shows, social media, sponsorships and artist outreach. It has been an amazing opportunity for me because I never really thought about gallery duties as an area of art work that I would be interested in. I love community and highly believe in the importance of outreach and bringing people together. There is so much to learn from others who have a completely different life from you and it has been amazing to be a part of this.

Recently at the gallery, I have been working on a illustrated map of Minneapolis for a show and reunion trip coming up. My main task has been about the sponsorships for these upcoming shows and travel residencies.

As for my work, I have been working on an illustration that combines clay, collage and digital elements. The illustration is for a company that focuses on diversity and community. I am not sure if I am allowed to actually discuss the details of the company quite yet so I will leave them out for now. I have never done anything like this before but it has been so fun. I don’t think I could ever do an illustration not like this ever again. Here is my sketch for the original illustration:

I started off by crafting 9 heads of characters that will be in the illustration. I then painted the heads and arranged them how I would want them to be in the illustration.

I used this picture to draw digitally on top of. I made a yellow background, I collaged some clothes out of some pictures of fabric and added speech bubbles.

After adding the speech bubbles I decided that instead of drawing in elements, I would sculpt them out of clay and add them on. Here is what everything is looking like now!

Can’t wait to add some finishing touches!

Week 9: March 25- March 31

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

This week the students have been introduced to a new project where they are all creating a stop motion. Carmen is using iPads with a stop motion program that the students can set to continuously take pictures or individually take pictures. The program is really cool and really easy to use. Within minutes I was really able to understand how to create a stop motion with the app. Amabelle, another teaching artist from our program, is going to be there during the days that I am not and she is teaching lessons on animation. The two lessons are going to merge really well together and I am super excited to see where the kids take it!

A lot of students are making stop motions based off of songs where they write out the lyrics in the photos that they take. I have loved to watch the process because a lot of students have been getting involved who don’t usually.

I plan to get in touch with Kelley this week to look into shadowing hir. I am hoping I can make this work before the semester is up because ze makes really interesting work that I would love to see.

For my own work, I am currently working on a huge clay illustration that I will post some progress pictures of in my next post!

Week 8: March 18-March 24

RESIDENCY- JUSTICE PAGE SCHOOL WITH ELISSA CEDARLEAF-DAHL - 35 HOURS

This week was a big one! When speaking about this residency placement I am going to need to divide this by days since everyday was so jam packed! I had a great time at this placement, I really learned a lot since it was so different from what I have been doing at the Children’s Residential Treatment Center.

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Monday, March 18th

This was the first day starting at Justice Page Middle School. The school had recently just changed its name to be named after Alan Page, retired Minnesota jurist and football player. He has a great message and has played a great roll in getting involved in the school after they renamed their name. The students had a big part in changing the name and already that told me a lot about the school and the students that would be there. This is a really socially forward school, the students and administrators have a lot of communication with each other and I thought that was really awesome.

Elissa immediately started to show me the ropes, she starts her day with a homeroom class that the school calls crew. Every morning they go through announcements for the school and play a game. This takes place in one of Elissa’s two classrooms in the school, her murals classroom. This is primarily where she teaches, she is the pioneer of a program that she started on teaching students how to make murals. Everyday she teaches one regular art class to a mix of 6th, 7th and 8th graders and the rest of the day she spends in the murals classroom with only 7th and 8th graders.

After crew we head upstairs to her regular art class where she is doing a lesson on abstract watercolor creatures, I will get into this a bit more later. The way that Elissa teaches is by making a demo video before hand and then plays it for her students. I liked this method since it allowed for her to pass out work while she played the demo and she can replay it multiple times for the class. The class sizes at this school are anywhere from 30-40 people so I can understand how this makes things much easier.

This is the students working on their abstract watercolor pieces.

After this class we went back down to Elissa’s mural class where I introduced myself and the students got started with labeling their mural panels. Elissa does murals on parachute fabric, or polytab, which allows for the mural to be painted in the classroom and then later installed on the building. She does this for almost all murals that she works on and it works really well for working with different populations.

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Tuesday, March 19

On Tuesday, the day was really different. I went with Elissa and some of her seventh grade students on a field trip to go see David Hogg speak. David Hogg was a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and one of the founders of the March for Our Lives movement. The students had just worked on some social justice posters and when he was coming to town, Elissa arranged for some of the students to go see him speak. It was a really incredible event. It was really nice to hear someone around my age have such a huge platform to speak on about issues that I feel really strongly about. It was nice and very expiring to hear the students discuss the talk after it happened.

After the field trip and other classes, Elissa took me along with her to go work on a mural at Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly. This was amazing. We worked with the elderly at the location to help paint pieces of the mural on poly tab. Elissa loved having me around because it make her work take half of the time. I always get attached to certain age groups and believe, “I really want to teach only this age” but then, I meet with another group and everything changes. I think I just really like people and teaching is the perfect avenue for that. I have lots of pictures of us at Friends of the Elderly!

This is a bonus photo of me painting some scrabble letters.

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Wednesday, March 20th

Today was a half day at the school so there was no crew in the morning and every class was about half of the time of a regular class. The day was early release so the teachers could have staff development on the topics of white supremacy and how to eliminate that from their schools. This is the day where we really planned out the lesson that I was going to teach the next day. I felt a little rushed on the lesson for this because all of my hours happened in one week but since there was an early release day, I got to go back early and work on the lesson plan and gather materials the next day.

I decided that I was going to do a lesson that worked along with Elissa’s current project because they are nearing midterms and I didn’t want to take away too much time from them being able to work on their projects. I use a paper ( that I am a very big fan of) called yupo paper. This is a synthetic paper that is non absorbent and essentially is just a piece of high quality plastic. It takes to oils really well which means that it picks up finger prints. This made me a little bit wary because even I have a really hard time with this paper sometimes because it is really finicky with water and inks and literally everything else that gets put on it. At the same time, it is SO fun and experimental. Its perfect for what the students are working on.

This is the example that I made for class showing different water color techniques on the paper.

Since Elissa does video demos for her class I decided to try her method and make a video demo while I made my example. The point of my lesson was to give the students a place to really see instant watercolor results and experiments before they moved on to their final so they could loosen up a bit. Many of the students weren’t fully understanding what it meant to make something abstract so I wanted to given them a place to experiment with it.

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Thursday, March 21st

I did my actual teaching today and on Friday. The lesson went REALLY well. The kids were so excited by the yupo paper because it was much less pressure than their final. Students kept calling me over just to show me different effects that the combination of water color and the paper made.

Some students got so into experimenting with the paper that they worked on it for the entire class period. Since I told the students it was plastic, a lot of them got the understanding that they could even run their entire paper underwater and it would not warp at all. I had a student come up to me for an extra piece so they could try it at home. It is really cool to bring such high quality products into the classroom because it sometimes brings forward an interest for students that they did not know that they even had!

This is me talking over my demo video before I handed out the paper to anyone.

Later on this day I brought in a lot of my work so that I could speak to the murals class about what its like to be an illustrator. I did this presentation of my work four times in total, twice on Thursday and twice on Friday. The students had a lot of really good questions and comments about my work. Some groups were more interested in my content while others were really interested in how I make money in my field. I was really happy to answer these questions because these are topics that I wish someone had come in and spoken to me about before I was in college.

Here I am discussing a series of work that I had made a while back.

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Friday, March 22nd

Today was repeat of everything that I had done the previous day but with different classes. The school runs on a A-day B-day schedule which means that every other day the classes switch off. For this day, I got to change my approach a bit since I had already done the lesson before and I got to explain more ways to play with the paper to the class. Here are some examples from this day:

In the murals class where I showed my work again, Elissa asked them for any advice that they had for me on being a teacher. I will end this journal with my favorite comment of the whole week. When asked for key teaching advice a student said to me, “always have a mop.” Don’t know why this one got me so good but it was very funny to me.

That concludes my week with Elissa! I am so glad that I got all of the opportunities that I did while working with her!

Week 7: March 11- March 17

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 HOURS

This week was the last week of the lesson that I did for my class on printmaking. Most of my students were done with the assignment that I had given to them and had started on their own endeavors with the same collagraph method. I was super impressed and excited by how into printmaking a few of my students got after doing my assignment.

Carmen sent me some photos of what the work looked like hung up after all of the students were done. We decided to hang up the plates with the prints so that you could see the process as well as the final prints.

I haven’t gotten to see the prints hung up on the wall quite yet but I will get to see them the next time I go back. On class on Thursday, I had some students that were frustrated with the printing process and I remembered a printing type that I had just learned in Intaglio class called mono printing.

Mono printing is a type of printing that is an individualized print that can only technically be printing one time. You use the brayer to put some ink down and then you put a piece of paper on top of the ink and draw an image on the back of a piece of paper. When you lift the paper you have a cryptic drawing/ print. Some of my students were really excited about this process!

This student made a lot of these prints and even gave me one to take home!

Next week I get to go to my next placement for the whole week, I am very excited to see how it goes.

Week 6: March 4-March 10

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 4 HOURS

This week was my lesson week which is obviously very exciting. I was really ready to teach my lesson because my kids are really encouraging and curious about what I had coming up. On Monday, I came in early so that I could set up all of my materials for class that day. I gave a quick explanation and then my students went right to it. I will post some picture examples of the crafting of the plates from the first day.

Students were very excited by the variety of materials which I wasn’t surprised by since I brought some things with very weird textures. The kids were especially interested in the plaster.

On Thursday, I did the main part of my lesson which was the actual printing demo. I am also going to repeat this demo on Monday because the amount of people in one classroom at one time fluctuates with this group and some student just were not ready to print. The printing process was a lot of trial and error but I tried to be really reassuring about this because even for a person who prints all the time, it sometimes is very difficult to get a good result. I was able to get most of my students to do at least 3 prints which may have been annoying to them at first but for most of them, by the third print, the image turned out really well. I don’t have many images of the final prints yet but I will take some more pictures when I head back in on Monday.

Looking back on my lesson, I think I would have made the content more interesting. I am finding that a lot of my students want to make second prints that don’t have to do with my original concept and a lot of those prints are starting to be character based. Another thing that I forgot to tell my students is that text will show up backwards and most didn’t seem too bothered by it but it still is something that I would for sure want to remember for next time.

This is a student using a barren to press their plate onto their paper.

Overall, it went really well. I was really excited to have a student end up really interested in printmaking after the lesson was over. He told me that he had always wanted to do this and that with in itself was enough for me to know that this lesson was worthwhile.

Week 5: February 24- March 3

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 3 Hours

I am teaching on Monday, I am very nervous but I have everything all planned out now. As I am writing this, I am making the examples that I will show my students for their lesson.

Last Monday, Carmen started class with a small presentation that showed the difference between photos using aperture priority and photos with general focus. The first unit seemed much more interested by this so I had a really good time setting up some fun little still lifes for the students to photograph.

My students wanted to make sure that I included that they had named the mice Jennifer and DiMaggio.

This is a student using aperture priority.

The second unit wasn’t as interested in using the cameras but me an a student did a lot of drawing together. She encouraged me to draw with my left hand and so we both did it together.

This is my students drawing.

My drawing!

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On Thursday, I drew with my students some more. After being at the treatment center, I went and met with Lynda to finalize my lesson plan. I got all of my materials ready and managed to gather some really interesting and weird materials that we can lay down on the collagraph plates for some good textures. I cant wait to see what the kids think!

Week 4: February 18- February 23

RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 1.5 HOURS

Monday once again got cancelled because the residential treatment center is a Minneapolis public school and they were closed for President’s day. Even though I didn’t go in, I did get the chance to speak with Lynda about the lesson that I will teach coming up soon!

I plan to teach on the 4th, 7th, and 11th of March since my lesson will be 3 parts. The class times are short and taking on printmaking means that there will be a bit of an extra mess so I do need to spread this out over a considerable amount of time. I am gonna teach my students about collagraph printing!

Collagraph printing is not something that I have ever even tried to do in my life but I am going to learn. I have been really into printmaking as a method of illustration and I wanted to bring that to the classroom without using fancy presses or carving tools. I want this to introduce printmaking to students but also give them options that don’t involve lots of extra equipment. Collagraph printing is where you take a piece of cardboard (or any form of hard plate) and glue down objects to it to make a 3d drawing. That then becomes the plate that you roll ink on and print with. This seemed like a really fun, low pressure method of printing to me so I am gonna use it to teach about printmaking and composition as a whole!

I currently don’t have examples or pictures that I can use to make what I am speaking of easily understandable but I plan to recruit a few of my friends to make some examples with me. It feels crazy that my lesson is coming up so soon, so I really have to pull things together kind of quickly to make things work.

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On Thursday, I was able to make it to the center and they had a new assignment lined up. The class is still doing photography but now they have moved on to a bit of abstract photography. Next Thursday the students are going on a trip to the Minnesota Public Library downtown to take some photos. Here is the assignment!

The day there was pretty laid back, some students were really excited about the photography but many of them were drawing or painting and I sat with them and did the same. Carmen gave me a sketchbook to keep there so that I could draw with the students and that was really fun. I presume that this upcoming week will be pretty similar.

Week 3: February 10- February 17

Residency- Children’s Residential Treatment Center with Carmen Elate- 1.5 Hours

My Monday at the Treatment Center got cancelled because Carmen wasn’t going to be around and the classes are very short so she thought it would just be more worthwhile to just come in on that Thursday. Thursday was Valentines Day so I planned in advance to make the students little valentines using a new printing technique that I am learning: intaglio.

The kids were super excited when they got the valentines and I used this print to explain how this form of printmaking works. I have been in between a lot of subjects that I want to do my lesson on because even though I am an illustrator, I dabble in a lot of mediums. I have been doing a bit of research on how to do printmaking without sharp tools or fancy presses. The students have access to sharp tools but I would honestly rather keep that out of the equation since the classroom isn’t made for print making anyway. When I told Carmen about this she gave me a small book that she had about unconventional printmaking that I am going to read and maybe come up with a way to use one of these methods in my lesson.

We spent the most of the class just hanging around and making valentines with fun tape and paper. I am using the time that I have there to get to know the students and connect with them so that I can find the best way to teach them appropriately. One of the students I talked to really wants to go to MCAD when they leave the treatment center and I thought that was pretty neat and they showed me a bit of their sketchbook. I took some pictures of the valentines that we made together.

We had a great time with glitter if you couldn’t tell. Carmen has lots of random supplies and me and another student worked together to make valentines for her family who was coming to visit the next day.

A few of the students were finishing up their novels that they wrote for a novel writing challenge that happened in November. A lot of them were really invested in finishing their stories and now Carmen is going to print the books through a website. The only issue is that the website doesn’t allow them to put the cover that they want on the book so it is my job this week to make a template for the students to put their cover of choice on the printed version of their novel.

I am excited to get there next week and see what else they are up to! As a bonus, I saw a turkey very close to the center out in the snow and took a picture!

Week 2: February 3-February 9

Residency- Children’s Residential Treatment Center with Carmen Elate- 3.5 Hours

I had my first day at the Residential Treatment Center this Monday. I walked in a few minutes late due to a lot of snow and a bit of a walk. When I arrived all of the students seemed already know that I was coming and they all were excited about it! The room has a good vibe, it’s warm toned and has lots of art materials, seating options, and motivational quotes .

The students are currently working on a photography and portrait assignment so my pictures for this week are a bit limited because in this facility I cannot have pictures of the students. Students are using a program called Pixlr to edit their photos and then Carmen has plans to print them out and place them in the classroom. Carmen has kind of arranged for the days that I am there to be more of an open studio so that I can just help the students on whatever they are working on. On Monday, I just got to know the students a bit and helped them take some photographs out in the hallway with string lights and other props.

On Thursday, I brought in my work to show the students and I think that was really important because it really showed the students what I was there for. After all, I make work for this age group and it felt really rewarding for them to look at my work and really resonate. The kids really took to my sketchbooks and so I think that for my teaching assignment I am going to do some book making and how to use a sketchbook for documentary and expressive purposes.

A few kids were really happy to get to show me the photos they took and how they edited them. Although I am not really proficient in Pixlr by any means, it has similar qualities to photoshop so I have had an easy time integrating myself into their project.

So far this placement has been simultaneously been the most rewarding thing I have done and one of the hardest. I relate to these kids a lot from my teenage years so I feel like I really understand what they are going through. It’s great to see these kids thrive in an art environment like this and see them flourish through just small opportunities to work on things that are really important to them. At the same time, it hurts me a little to know that they are going through it. I am already growing really fond of the students and the environment and it’s only week one!

My little surprise for next week is I am gonna make the kids intaglio print valentines since I will be there on Valentines Day! Carmen thinks its a great idea so I am very excited to do that on Thursday.

This is the photography assignment that the students are working on right now.

This is one of the students starting to edit her photo that she took of her shoes.

Week 1: January 28th-February 2nd

Residency- Children’ s Residential Treatment Center with Carmen Elate (cancelled all week due to weather!) - 1 hour

I was supposed to start at the Children’s Residential Treatment Center this past week but we had a snow storm on the first day that I was supposed to go and freezing temperatures the next day. Not to be discouraged though, there seems to be no bad forecast this upcoming week so my placement is a go!

I met up with Carmen Elate before winter break to set up our schedule. It is a little hard to get in many hours at a time since the art class timing is a bit short. I have arranged to come in for 3 hours a week and continue for as long as is needed to finish off the hours. I presume that this extended time will actually help me get to know the students better and maybe even give me multiple opportunities for lessons because of the spread out time. Carmen and I discussed some projects that I could maybe work on with the students and that is very exciting.

The students are a big age range, starting at 7th grade all the way up to 12th grade. One thing that they all have been working on is novels. Back in November, according to Carmen, there was a challenge for students to write novels and they have all been so excited about their writing that they have yet to stop writing these novels. I plan to work on making covers with the students that can really convey their message. They have already made stand in covers but Carmen said that she would really like to give the students the opportunity to work on the covers using traditional means. I love collage and multimedia so I may use that as part of my lesson plans. Carmen has lots of really high quality supplies for drawing and many other forms of art so I am really excited to get started tomorrow!

Residency- 6-8 Art at the Justice Page School with Elissa Cedarleaf-Dahl

Elissa and I have been communicating over email this past week and we have decided that I will complete my time with her during spring break. I plan to meet with Elissa before hand so that we can get settled with what I plan to teach since the time will be very condensed.

Shadowing: Kelley Meister

Kelly has a ton of really exciting projects coming up that I really hope to be a part of but all of them have lots of travel involved. Kelly has very kindly offered to give me a ride when ze teaches at the Faribault School for the Deaf but the commute is an hour long and seems to be a whole day experience which I am not quite sure if I can fit in yet. I will continue to be in touch with hir as the semester pans out in the next couple of weeks to make a solid plan.