Art Throw Down!

During Spring Break my mentor teacher and I took eight students to Piedmont Park Dogwood Arts Festival in order to enter them into a drawing competition called the Art Throwdown. Around ten schools competed against each other using their best students. Most of the competitions involved speed drawing and it was really intense. The first challenge was called the "Face Off" where the students would sit across from each other and only were allowed five minutes to draw the person's face across from them. The judges took resemblance and strong gestural marks into consideration and would come around each 5 minutes and tap you on the shoulder if you did not make it into the next round. This kept going until only five students were left and they picked the best out of those five drawings. One of our students won first place in the face off challenge out of about 20 people who entered!

The next challenge was figure drawing that was divided into a 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, and 30 min drawing session. We entered different students into each section and the judges focused on gesture marks and body motion in the first 5 min session. The second competition was just for teachers and my mentor and teacher I competed using Nu pastels as our medium. The 15 min focused on lighting and shading while also judging on proportions and likeness of the depicted model. The last session was based off of the students' interpretation of the model and they could create a scene or costume for the model they portrayed. We had one student win second place in the 5 min drawing challenge and one won 4th place in the 15 min challenge.

The last challenge was a design competition, where a pair of students would team up in order to design a chair that fits specific needs. They gave each pair of students a Simpson's character and gave what their needs were for the chair and they had to build a model using either cardboard, clay, wire, straws, or tape. Our students' character was an astronaught who had a hard time staying in his seat because of there is not gravity in space. This one I thought was one of the hardest ones, but the boys had fun working together to build a model chair.

Overall the day was a lot of fun and we also got the chance to check out different artists' booths around the festival!