Duncan was absent during the first day of printmaking. When he returned, I hadn’t even made it halfway to his seat before his friends began teaching him what they had learned the previous day. Their tutoring was so thorough that I didn’t need to assist Duncan with any additional instruction. His friends displayed such enthusiasm walking him through the process and their positive attitude was infectious. Together, the three of them created this piece... read more below

Christina demonstrated such incredible tenacity with this piece. The first version of this sculpture was accidentally knocked off the shelf by Mr. Anderson. Christina showed such grace at the accident. She was understanding and immediately got to work remaking it. After it was fired, Christina wasn’t happy with how rough the surface of the sculpture was. Unfortunately, we discovered that we didn’t have the right grit of sandpaper to make much progress with wet sanding... read more below

Veronica took a lot of risks with this piece. One risk was layering glazes on the turtle shell. Despite not knowing how it would turn out once it was fired, Veronica was determined to experiment with multiple glazes on top of each other to add variety, it resulted in some truly fantastic colors. Had she not had such a positive outlook on risk, this work would not have been as successful. However, not all the risks Veronica took paid off initially... read more below

This piece was inspired by an inside joke between Renee and her brother. Her fondness for the jest pushed her to perfect this piece, spending a lot of time smoothing out the simple shapes and asking for advice from her teachers and peers when she needed it. This piece is a wonderful example of the impact joy has on student work in the classroom.

This mushroom tree was created for Emely’s father. It’s a phenomenal example of how Emely's desire to share the things she’s passionate about with those she cares for drives her best work.

Jaden had such a wonderful attitude while working on this piece. This was Jaden’s first pinhole camera photo. Our students had never done dark room photography before, and, despite our warning that it may not work out the first time, he dove into the project and gave it his all from the start. His optimism resulted in one of the best pieces from the semester.

During our portraiture assignment, Naomi chose to depict a friend of hers in the class. She showed such great enthusiasm for making sure that all the details were correct. Naomi asked for help, both from her teachers and her peers, to make sure this piece honored her friend by being some of her best work.

Natalia was not happy with the number of stray lines in her first few block prints. Instead of getting frustrated, she used it as a chance to experiment. To get the effect she wanted, Natalia combined block printing and monoprinting, carving and wiping away the areas where she didn’t want ink in the background. This resilience in the face of adversity, and the sound belief in herself to overcome challenges, pushed her to experiment with aspects of printmaking beyond the scope of our lesson.

During our block printing lesson, Keren took a different approach to her carving technique. Instead of starting by outlining her object and then carving away the background to create a clean line, like we had showed during our demo, she chose to take a risk and experimented, seeing what would happen if she tried carving away the object with lines all going in the same direction. Her awareness of the upper limits of her own abilities, as well as her determination to... read more below

Chesney took on a challenging task sketching the black power fist in this piece. His determination to ensure that the fingers were appropriately sized, and the wrinkles properly placed during the sketching phase of this project paid off. That stalwart attention to detail made this piece one of his strongest yet.

It seemed like Dari really realized how much skill Dari has with this piece. Dari really showed animation’s potential for fabricating the fantastic by turning the person into a spider like being. The choice really pushed the person’s climbing movement. Dari seemed proud of the animation and enthusiastically shared it with classmates when it was finished.

Angelie put a lot of time and effort into perfecting the paw pads, ensuring that they were the same size and perfectly smooth, only to have her work split in the kiln. Working with our visiting ceramicist, Angelie was able to repair the sculpture and embraced the flaws, turning the remnants of the crack into a feature of the piece. Being reminiscent of the texture of a real dog paw, the crack more solidly grounds the paw in reality.