Art teachers incorporate humor, play, game creation, and imagination into their lessons. Young students assemble surreal imaginative photomontages, elementary students create pinch-pot monsters and 3D environments to film in stop-motion animation, middle-school students reference pop culture in playful pop art television sculptures, high-school students interpret their social media personas through photo collage, and more.
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Having a well-developed sense of humor is a definite asset for an art teacher, both for your own peace of mind and your students’ engagement in art-making. This month, we offer a humorous take on personality paintbrushes, exaggerated portraits, monstrous pinch pots, pop art sculptures with a mathematical twist, playfully constructed televisions, paintings based on games, and much more. Where will humor lead you?
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My students love surrealism. When I showed them the art of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, their imaginations soared. They loved the silliness and the dreamlike bending of reality. It mirrored their play. I would watch them create their own cities with LEGOs and blocks and then populate them with action figures, dolls, and any other toys or items they had. I decided to introduce an art project using the surrealist notions of my students’ playtime imaginations and the photomontages that grew out of the Dadaist movement.
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While a monster head is fun, placing a monster in an environment creates endless possibilities and creative scenarios. Students were asked to develop a 3D environment for their creation using cardstock, glue, tape, markers, paint, and other miscellaneous materials. I was impressed with how they tackled this challenge. Some of the environments included a monster under the bed, arguing with a big sock, at a park, at a birthday party, and fishing in a lake.
My grandfather, Wallace Oscar Hughes, was a wildlife artist. He made his living drawing animals for books, magazines, stamps, and more. His specialty was birdlife. When I was a kid learning to draw, my grandpa gave me a tip that has helped me with my artwork ever since. He told me, “It doesn’t matter how realistically you draw. Instead, just notice what makes each bird special. Then make sure to include those special details in your drawing.” That concept is the basis of an art lesson that has worked very successfully with students of all ages in class and online.
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Each year, my colleague and I develop a ceramics unit that will engage our students and produce a variety of exciting results. Pop art offers plenty of ideas to inspire students, and it also allows us to focus on a variety of forms that incorporate geometric nets and mathematics. A mathematical/geometry net is a 2D representation of a 3D shape. It is a 2D shape that can be folded to form a 3D shape or a solid. It is also the pattern made when the surface of a 3D figure is laid out flat, showing each face of the figure.
My objective for this lesson was for students to each construct a 3D television in a pop art style. Students had to include a self-portrait and demonstrate their understanding of background, middle ground, and foreground. Creating playful televisions was a logical way to reference important concepts behind the pop art movement, such as pop culture, mass media, advertising, and consumerism.
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During the winter months of the pandemic, our students were holed up indoors, in their classrooms and bedrooms, feeling uninspired to take new and exciting photographs. Not only that, but their Instagram, Flickr, and other social media posts increased tenfold as their world of access and interconnection through the internet expanded. This backdrop inspired me to create a conceptual project that didn’t require new photographs to be taken, but did invoke inquiry and hands-on studio time.
I felt that my high-school students really needed a change from the tedium and monotony of their daily school schedules. I wanted to come up with a lesson that would give students a chance to unwind and create something visually exciting. When students arrived in class, I announced that their assignment would be to “play for a day.” I had an assortment of puzzles, card games, and board games spread out in corners of the room for students to choose from. During the next phase of the project, students selected the game that was most memorable to them to use as inspiration for a play-themed artwork.
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For many students, the learning is in the process itself and not the product. As art educators, we often look at the final artwork for assessment, but perhaps we should assess our learners on a combination of the artistic process and the final outcomes. I find that it’s best to be flexible and provide multiple pathways for success. Praise along the way can be a great motivator.
Video game developer and educator Pippin Barr invites viewers/participants to immerse themselves in his video games. He combines visual art with an incisive knowledge of programming to create unusual video games that challenge the nature of games, artwork, and entertainment. Barr produces about ten free online games a year. They are not games in the traditional sense, because the gamer cannot always “win.” They are thought-provoking pseudo-performance pieces in which the player is a participant as well as a viewer.
