ATAI day out!

I became a member of the Art Teachers Association of Ireland when I started studying art education, i'm now the treasurer of the association. It's a great group to be involved in, i've met so many lovely people and have learned so much from teachers with much more expertise than myself!

We had our end of year day out last Saturday, it was great! We went to Camden Fort, it was so interesting and loads of great photo ops, all these decaying abandoned old buildings, love them! I got slightly obsessed with photographing the old ruined walls, they all looked like these incredible surreal landscapes. I featured a few here and have more on my flickr. We also went to the Be Creative studio in Carrigaline for some life drawing, so much great stuff happening there. There are so many classes I want to do and not enough time!

Here are a few pics from Be Creative, such a great spot!

Our drawings:

Some lovely kids work from Be Creative:

Pics from the sewing studio:

Wire Sculpture

First ever wire sculpture! This was done as part of the curriculum studies module for the H. Dip in art and design teaching. I focused on retaining the cleanness of the wire line and building this as sparsely as possible. I went on to build another wire sculpture, taking the opposite approach - layering it up with loads of wire to create texture. I'll photograph that and pop that up here too when I get a chance.

We've finished semester one now, it's been great! I've really enjoyed it. We don't have college again now until February so it will be really nice to be able to fully concentrate on teaching at school and put in longer days there.

First Year Animations

One of my first year groups recently completed these animations in our art class. I'm so impressed with how much they learned and how well they applied it, we had very limited time to complete these animations and I thought that we would still be working on them after Christmas, happily, they all got done in time for the Christmas break. So proud of them!

Dia de los Muertos

I'm doing a Day of the Dead class with my TY group tomorrow in school. I love Mexican culture and their vibrant art tradition and I wanted to take a different approach to the usual Hallowe'en themed art done in schools. I also think there's something a lot more edgy and exciting about the Day of the Dead art than the traditional Hallowe'en images we get here.

I've featured two female artists here, Sylvia Ji and the wonderful ZSO. Sylvia Ji uses the traditional Catarina image in her work a lot, ZSO dipped her toe into Mexican art with these fab Calavera, I love them all!

Very unseasonably I did a few calavera back in August for a friends birthday, great fun to paint, hopefully the pupils will enjoy it tomorrow.

Pinterest

I know i've been neglecting the blog recently, it's been a pretty busy summer and for the next 9 months i'm doing a H. Dip in art and design so it's going to be HECTIC.

I'm going to have to start keeping a professional teaching blog as part of the course pretty soon so i've a feeling my personal blog may be even more neglected... :(. The course is already really busy and i'm finding reasons to love Pinterest EVEN MORE! It's so great for pinning images relating to classwork. I'm teaching drawing at the moment and it's really handy for putting together and keeping track of visual aids. I'm teaching perspective next week, where to start?! A friend suggested here.