In my Art+Design class, we are starting to do some applied design projects. We began with graphic design and started with a poster design.
I began by showing students a lot of slides of Matisse, one of my favorite artists. He uses bold colors. He captures movement. His compositions are often compared to music. We looked at lots of samples and discussed what music his compositions made us think of.
Students sketched the shapes they liked as I talked. I call this Taking Art Notes. They take notes, but they don't use any words...just shapes.
At the end of my slide show, the students had some beautiful compositions in their notes.
The assignment: Create a poster for a
concert using Matisse-inspired cut paper designs.
We each needed a name for our band. So we played a game similar to Spoons. We each wrote down 5 random words on notecards (one word on each card). We sat on the floor in a circle. When I said go, we passed one of our cards to the player on the right. That began the game. We had 4 minutes to discard words we didn't want and keep cards we liked. Cards had to keep moving quickly, picking up and discarding cards. At the end of 4 minutes everyone had 3 to 5 cards in their hand. They had to pick two or three words to form the name of their band.
I pulled out two large pads of colored paper and a box of scissors. Students had to create an 11 x 17 inch poster using only scissors and cut paper. They used their Matisse sketches for shapes to include. I had printouts of the concert venue and times. They had to cut their band name out of paper, too.
We had a great time getting creative with combinations of music, crazy band names, and crazy shapes.
Here are the results:
