Those who know me, know I’m a real geek for color and composition, and that I love finding ways to use technology to produce great art pieces with my students. The scrolls I made with my IB class are one of those art units that evolved over time improving to what is now this project. The idea came from a night where I was making an art piece live in front of an audience at an event in Shanghai. It was an image of a man in a sombrero showing off the infamous “Beijing Bikini”…a Chinese tradition of rolling up one’s shirt to let off some steam in the summer months. I attached the piece to two scroll handles to add some irony. Since then, I’ve been looking for a way to bring the scrolls into my teaching in a less cheeky way.
There’s a lot that goes into an art unit like this. Separate lessons on advanced use of color and composition with vocabulary tests that follow. Some basic lessons with Photoshop. A photoshoot to gather original source material for the artwork. Then finding a vendor to print the work on canvas. The last step is to see if they can analyse the work effectively in a process portfolio screen.
There’s a beautiful connection to art history in this one. All the photos that students use are of the city. They’re fragmented abstract landscapes of Shanghai. I see them as a contemporary interpretation of the ancient landscape scroll paintings on display in the national art museum. More importantly, the students start to build a more intuitive relationship with art making and the forces that drive the visual language (hence the codex reference). They know that I want them to disassemble the imagery into completely non-objective abstraction, I’ll often hear students turn from their computers and ask “Is this one crazy enough yet Mr. Schell?”.
Below are pictures of the results and some pics of my night painting the Beijing bikini man live.
Draw, Paint, Think 
I enjoy seeing how your work has evolved and how you are inspiring and pushing your students in their creative exploration. BRAVO!
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