Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
I had the chance to sit-in on a wonderful guest class by a local artist, Blaine Deutsch. He got us to try Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies approach for when you’re stuck on something. It’s a set of cards, each with a short phrase aimed at rejiggering your thinking. I got the card below:
You can find the very nice card sets (and other merch) on Eno’s Oblique Strategies website, but there are also lots of webpages that will throw up a random one for you, including my own:
One of my students really got into spray-paint art this year, especially planets. By the time she was done she’d completed over two dozen pieces; some on paper, some on wood, some on clear plastic or acetate, and some of which we backlit with LED’s. Her paintings are all over the Makerspace, which generates a lot of interest.
However, now that this student has graduated, we’ve had to find another way to teach the process. I’m using the above video as a quick introduction to the process (note: it starts at 36 seconds because the author uses a single rude word in her preamble).
One of my favorite pieces of art from this year, perhaps because it captures so much of the 2020 experience, and speaks to the way we try to cope during a pandemic.
Having to work from home for most of the first half of the year prompted the persuit of some mellow, non-distracting background music. This lead to the discovery of lofi hip hop channels on YouTube. One of the most popular of which (on the ChilledCow channels) has a simple lofi study girl animation. This image seems to have its roots in the wonderful, Japanese, Studo Ghibli movie Whisper of the Heart.
The image evolved into a meme, with the girl being relocated to different parts of the world–Bored Panda has a number of examples.
Switched on Pop has an excellent podcast episode on the Lofi Music phenomenon called Why lo-fi is the perfect background music. It delves into the history and economics, but focuses on the musical qualities–beats, semi-random elements, etc–that make it well situated for background music.
Apart from the visual and contextual appeal of the Lofi Cali Girl image at the top of this post, the biography of the artist is quite interesting in how it encapsulates an internet-era artistic trajectory. In addition to traditional drawing classes and a BA in Art she credits:
What helped me the most was actually being part of the deviantART community where I learned from other artists by observing their works, and the free tutorials they provided.
Yuumei, FAQ
Her extensive use of them has lead her to create and publish her own free tutorials.
Another one of this interim’s student-lead projects was a lesson in cutting out paper patterns. The colors were beautiful, the patterns elegant.
I was looking for mathematical functions I could use to shape guitar bodies, and I came across Hubpages’ user calculus-geometry‘s beautiful page on how to generate butterfly outlines using functions in polar coordinates.
The butterfly above was generated using the function:
r(θ) = 12 – sin(θ) + 2 sin(3θ) + 2 sin(5θ) – sin(7θ) + 3 cos(2θ) – 2 cos(4θ)
The code I used (using VPython) is:
from visual import *
''' the main function '''
def r(theta):
#r = 1+cos(theta)
#Archimides' sprial
#r = 0.5*(theta)
#heart: http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT669/Essay.ideas/Heart/Hearts.html
#r = 5*sin(theta) - sin(5*theta)
#butterfly: http://calculus-geometry.hubpages.com/hub/Butterfly-Curves-in-Polar-Coordinates-on-a-Graphing-Calculator
#r = 8-sin(theta)+2*sin(3*theta)+2*sin(5*theta)-sin(7*theta)+3*cos(2*theta)-2*cos(4*theta)
r = 12-sin(theta)+2*sin(3*theta)+2*sin(5*theta)-sin(7*theta)+3*cos(2*theta)-2*cos(4*theta)
return r
'''convert to rectangular coordinates'''
def xy(r, theta):
x = r * cos(theta)
y = r * sin(theta)
return vector(x, y)
path = curve(color=color.green, radius=.2)
theta = 0.0
print pi, theta, r(theta) , xy(r(theta), theta)
while theta <= 2*pi:
rate(100)
theta += 0.01
path.append(pos=xy(r(theta), theta))
Sanding and sculpting the guitar bodies was loud, dusty and took a while.
The shape of an electric guitar’s body does not matter that much–they’ve even been made out of 2×4 (inches) pieces of wood–, so there’s a lot of room for creativity when sculpting your guitar’s shape. There’s a little more restriction for the guitar bodies from the guitarbuilding project because they come with cutouts for the electronics that have to be avoided. However, your main limitation is time.
Even with the big rasp, sculpting is not easy, especially since some of the types of wood used for the bodies can be quite hard. The darker strip in mine was particularly difficult.
I chose to carve out two parts of the body. First, it’s a lot more comfortable if the bit where the guitar tucks into your ribs is curved and smoothed; second, shaving down the area where your strumming forearm comes across the guitar makes the strings easier to get to.
Once the sculpting was done, I used a router to round all the other edges.
Emiland De Cubber‘s excellent instructional on how to make good slideshows.
De Cubber also gives an excellent demonstration of how to fix a terrible slideshow by improving the NSA’s atrocious, leaked slideshow.
I just like this picture.
