HEArt of the City laid the first strokes of paint on the music room wall at Costano!  On the inaugural day of painting, students continue to build their understanding of how inner peace and strength can help them make a positive impact on their community’s health.  Before getting to work in the mural, they discussed the VALUE of art and beauty in their lives.  The students then rotated through two workshops that reiterate how the physical act of art is calming and empowering.  In the first, students worked on charcoal drawings to practice creating VALUE, one of the key elements of mural design.  In the second, the students practiced their graffiti calisthenics before filling in the background sunset.

The beginnings of the graffiti mural

Value drawings

HEArt of the City is learning the calisthenics of graffiti – knees bent, arms outstretched.  Practicing the proper stance will help these students gain control and precision with the spray can.  Work on the music room mural begins next week.  BELIEVE it!

Believe

Graffiti stance

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Costano students finished up their canvas boards in preparation for their leap into the world of spray paint.  Coming up, students will be studying murals in depth and discussing ways to make an impact on their school community through the arts.  The students will be painting a mural on the music room wall.  Melody and music = HEArt!

Magda helps a student with her sketch

HEArt of the City

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The students at Costano are learning quickly that graffiti is not just about drawing letters that look cool.  Graffiti artists need to be proficient in color theory and perspective in order to create compositions that have truly unique style and strong impact.  Last Thursday, students learned how to incorporate one and two-point perspective into original drawings.  Their beautiful drawings are pictured below.

Byren uses pencil and prismacolor markers to create perspective

Mid way through a beautiful work of art

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The effect of building on color theory and perspective skills on enhancing graffiti knowledge is clear when we see the truly impressive work the students are producing.  Soon, HEArt of the City will be creating their own professional-quality canvasses with a word of their choice.  This will be the last step before they begin to learn spray paint technique.

Impressive student work

Danny shows off some fine graffiti work

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Students at Costano are not only learning how to create beautiful graffiti art, but also ways that graffiti can make a positive impact on their community.  Before beginning their artwork, the students were asked to respond to the following questions:  Given the chance, what message would you send to your community using graffiti art? After all that you have learned, what is graffiti art to you?

Students then continued to practice breaking down the alphabet into “bar” format. Students will soon be able to manipulate the bars of any letter in a way that adds personal style to the given letter.  Students practiced putting letters together to form a logo or word of their choice.  They are on their way to creating master pieces!

Artwork from HEArt of the City

Student practices "Letters As Bars" format

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At Costano, our HEArt of the City students are becoming graffiti super stars.  On the second day of class, students are already able to appreciate the many facets of a powerful graffiti piece.  Laura taught students basic color theory and the ways that color heightens the impact of an art piece.  Through a series of exercises, the Costano students were able to identify and analyze color relationships and the ways that color represents different emotions.  Students filled in a graffiti tag with monochromatic shading, using colors that represented their moods.

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The new year began on Tuesday with a lesson on graffiti letter evolution.  Students learned a method of thinking about letters as a combination of overlapping bars.  Students learn to manipulate bars to develop personal style and to add movement to their work.  Through guided practice, students learned how letters progress through style and manipulation to create strong compositions.  Importantly, our graffiti lessons end with a self-critique so that students learn to appreciate how important it is to analyze their own artwork in order to improve.

12-15-09

HEArt at Costano Elementary in East Palo Alto began this week!  This quarter, our Costano program focuses on graffiti arts to teach healthy lifestyles for youth.  The rock star teaching team for this urban graffiti program, “HEArt of the City,” includes Magda, a graffiti artist and PhD student at Stanford, Laura, a muralist and senior at UC Santa Cruz, and Zaid and Marilyn, our Teen Art Instructors.

In the first week, students are introduced to ways graffiti enables healthy changes for the self and the community.  Students learned about the graffiti alphabet and basic elements in a graffiti piece.  They got to see examples of graffiti pieces, and then practiced their own tags!

Our new HEART OF THE CITY graffiti students check out some cool graffiti books: