Visual Arts - 10th and 11th Grade
Vertex Partnership Academies, NY, USA
(2025 - 2026)
Guiding students in developing creative practice, critical thinking, and artistic expression. In both areas, I have developed resources, projects, and a classroom culture that foster innovation, problem-solving, and collaboration.
Also facilitated after school zine club and the school’s first yearbook club guiding the senior students document and visually shape their collective high school narrative.
Pop Art
Students explored the Pop Art movement through the works of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, examining ideas of mass production, repetition, popular culture, and the significance of Warhol's Factory studio practice.
To build confidence in portrait drawing, students first practised using the grid method before creating a high-contrast portrait of a chosen pop culture figure. Their drawings were then transferred onto linoleum, hand-carved, and printed as a series of vibrant colour variations inspired by Warhol's Marilyn prints.
Students developed:
Observational drawing through the grid system
Linocut printmaking techniques
An understanding of repetition, editioning, and mass production
Connections between art history, contemporary culture, and studio practice
Collage - Composition & Visual Storytelling
Drawing inspiration from the work of Romare Bearden and Hannah Höch, students explored how found imagery, collage, and material manipulation can transform familiar images into new visual narratives.
The unit began with an investigation of texture and mixed media, where students reinterpreted well-known artworks using materials such as coloured paper, yarn, cotton, and acrylic paint. This encouraged them to think beyond representation and consider how materials themselves can communicate meaning.
Students developed:
Mixed media and collage techniques
Composition through storyboarding and thumbnail sketching
Visual storytelling using foreground, middleground, and background
Material exploration and conceptual thinking
Connections between art history, film, and contemporary visual culture
Genre Painting
Building on these ideas, students explored composition through the language of cinema and storyboarding. By creating multiple thumbnail sketches of the same scene, they experimented with framing, foreground, middleground, background, and point of view before selecting the composition that communicated their narrative most effectively. Using magazine imagery and mixed media, students then developed collage compositions inspired by Romare Bearden's depictions of everyday life, discovering how decontextualised images can be reassembled to create entirely new stories.
Self-Portrait - Watercolour & Identity
Students explored the self-portrait as a form of visual storytelling through the work of artists including Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. Rather than viewing a self-portrait as a simple likeness, we discussed how artists use composition, props, clothing, lighting, colour, background, and point of view to communicate identity and personal narrative.
Alongside these discussions, students developed foundational watercolour techniques through studies of brush control, value, spheres, and facial features before photographing themselves and creating a full-scale self-portrait using the grid method. Particular emphasis was placed on careful observation: mixing accurate skin tones, rendering different hair textures, and making intentional artistic choices that reflected how they wished to represent themselves.
Students developed:
Watercolour painting techniques
Portrait drawing using the grid method
Colour mixing and observational skills
Self-portraiture as visual storytelling
Connections between art history and personal expression
Artists At Work -
