SELFYisms

High School, Drawing and Painting I students used visual symbolism through collage and drawing. My "Everyday" students had to consider how the principles (balance, variety, unity, contrast, emphasis, rhythm, movement) are combined to communicate meaning in the creation of their artwork. They also discussed isms in art. "Isms" are distinctive doctrines, systems, or theories, and in the art world they typically signify art movements or styles. The suffix (word fragment added at the end of a word to modify its meaning) "-ism" marks a word as one signifying a doctrine, theory, or system of principles; or an attitude strongly in favor of or against a given group; a distinctive or characteristic trait; an action, process, or practice; a characteristic behavior or quality; a state or condition resulting from an excess of something specified.* Check out http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/ij/isms.html.  In the pre-lessons students created paintings of atmospheric perspective to understand Value: The lightness or darkness of a color tonal range. That was to prepare them for knowing how to shade the contours of their face with various shades of grey between absolute black and absolute white. Today’s teens seem so self-absorbed with their hand-held devices. I tried to take advantage of that by encouraging them to use a selfy as the subject of their art, and called this assignment “Selfyisms”