AP Breadth Portfolio 

“The greater the investment the greater the reward”, Thomas Bentley

-Creative choice is the key to student investment

-Doing something different or challenging perpetuates independent thinking

-Creative imagery exercises promote trial and error approaches to discovering a problematic solution

 

In the Drawing Portfolio, mastery of drawing can be demonstrated through a wide range of approaches and media.  Light and shade, line quality, rendering of form, composition, surface manipulation, and illusion of depth are drawing issues that can be addressed through a variety of means, which could include painting, printmaking, mixed media, etc.  Abstract, observational, and inventive works may be submitted.  The range of marks used to make drawings, the arrangement of the marks, and the materials used to create the marks are endless.

 

Art-Think: Ways of Working

1. Identify: Set the problem or task, identify the subject.

 

2. Analyze:Examine the subject; break it down, classify it.

 

3. Ideate:Think, fantasize, produce ideas. Generate options towards a creative solution. Relate, rearrange, reconstruct.

 

4. Select:Choose your best option.

 

5. Implement:Put your ideas into action. Realize It. Transform imagination and fantasy into tangible form.

6. Evaluate:Judge the result. Think about new options and possibilities that have emerged.

Go back to Step #1.

 

Assignment 1 Pull three Words: 

 

 

 "Image,Layers,Words" 

 

Objectives: Students will improve design skills, students will learn photo transfer techniques. Students will explore ways to formulate concentration ideas.

Procedure:

Each student creates a list of 4 verbs on four small pieces of paper to drop into a bag.

 

-Draw 3 possible Verbs and create a piece of art using drawing or mark making tools (ink, paint, collage...)

 

-Create layers using Latex paint and acetone

 

Drawing is a process of making marks; yet the nature of these marks and their relationship to one another determine their impact.  Lines, dots, even scribbles can be applied with a sensitive hand and eye to create a rich, personal statement.

 

Whether these marks read as a childish scrawl or an eloquent, convincing image depends to a certain extent on the artist’s intention and his or her ability to carry out that intention.

 

Assignment 2 Make a list.
Personal Strength Square

 

The advantage of list-making is that one idea naturally leads to another. Afterward you have a written record that can be reviewed by you or others. Perhaps the second or third time through the list a word or phrase will suddenly spark your thinking in a new direction. Create a piece involving 2 combinations from your list. Your drawing may be composed of emotions, objects, places, people...

 

Four traits you like in yourself

1._________________________

2._________________________

3._________________________

4._________________________

 

Four things your friends like about you

1._________________________

2._________________________

3._________________________

4._________________________

 

Four accomplishments you are proud of

1._________________________

2._________________________

3._________________________

4._________________________

 

Four things you can do that you feel good about

1._________________________

2._________________________

3._________________________

4._________________________

 

 

Assignment 3

Create a Drawing by selecting 1 word from each list below 

 

                              

 

girl

dog

chair

boy

building

cat

house

church

child

boat

airplane

table

teacher 

baseball

basketball

book

knife

spoon

fork

bowl 

plate

skateboard

stick

tree

lizard

Monkey

donkey

chicken

clock

sock

 

 

 Complete your drawing by following the 6 steps below.

 

l.Subtract. Simplify. Omit. Remove certain parts or elements. Take something away from your subject. Compress it or make it smaller. Think: What can be eliminated, reduced, disposed of? What rules can you break? How can you simplify, abstract, stylize or abbreviate?

 

–“Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify!”

-Henry David Thoreau

 

“Less is more.”

Arni Ratia, Swiss designer

 

2 Repeat. Repeat a shape, color, forth, image or idea. Reiterate, echo, restate or duplicate your reference subject in sonic way. Think: How can you control the factors of occurrence, repercussion, sequence and progression?

 

“Every feeling tends to a certain extent to become deeper by repetition.”

-J. Sully

 

3.Combine. Bring things together. Connect, arrange, link, unify, mix, merge, wed, rearrange. Combine Ideas, materials and techniques. Bring together dissimilar things to produce synergistic integrations. Ask: What else can you connect to your subject? What kind of connections can you make from different sensory modes, frames of reference or subject disciplines?

 

“All art, and most knowledge, entails either seeing connections or making them. Until it is hooked up with what you already know, nothing can ever be learned or assimilated.”

-Ralph Caplan

 

4.Add. Extend, expand, or otherwise develop your reference subject. Augment it, supplement, advance or annex it. Magnify it. Make it bigger. Think: What else can be added to your idea, Image, object, or material?

 

5.Transfer. Move your subject into a new situation, environment or context. Adapt, transpose, relocate, dislocate. Adapt the subject to a new and different frame of reference. Move the subject out of its normal environment; transpose it to a different historical, social, geographical or political setting or time. Look at it from a different point of view.

–Adapt an engineering principle, design quality, or other special quality of your subject to that of another. (The structure of a bird’s wing, for example, has served as a model for designing bridges).

–Transfer can also denote transformation. Think: How can your subject be converted, translated, or transfigured? (See also MEFAMORPHOSE and HYBRIDIZE.)

 

6.Empathize. Sympathize. Relate to your subject; put yourself in its “shoes.” If the subject is inorganic or inanimate, think of it as having human qualities. How can you relate to it emotionally or subjectively?

 

Offering helpful insight to an student, the eighteenth century German painter Henry Fuseli once advised, “Transpose yourself into your subject”

 

“I imagine myself as a rider of a beam of light.”

-Albert Einstein