Visitors to the campus of Orland High School (OHS) will never question that they have stepped into a world of the masses: kids, activity, personalities, busyness, and playfulness--a veritable cloud of mild bedlam. The wall of ceramic faces that greets a visitor in the school office is another reminder of the organized chaos that the teachers…

Ed Ruscha's exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco presented a fantastic and challenging teaching approach not just to art creation, but also to the whole definition of art. Ruscha painted with pastels and drew with pencils, but he also made art using Pepto Bismol, carrots, and spinach. In this article, the author describes an art…

Orland is a small agricultural town in Northern California. The community has been deluged with fundraisers and requests for money. The author knew there must be a way to self-fund. She took a closer look at what made some of their community artists successful, and she looked at what the public bought. Her challenge was to put together a project…

Lori Stevens teaches in the art department of Orland High School, a small high school of 600 students in Orland, California. Her program includes Art 1, Studio Art, and Advanced Placement all in one room, with one budget, and one teacher. She has been teaching art in this setting for twenty years. This article features a color photo of her class…

Teaching high school students the "grammar" of art--the principles and elements of art and design--while also teaching them about creativity and concept can be difficult. This author has found that combining beginning lessons in line, shape, value, texture, form, and color with projects requiring innovation and inspiration, though challenging, is…

The author describes a lesson she did on abstract art with her high school art classes. She passed out a required step-by-step outline of the project process. She asked each of them to look at abstract art. They were to list five or six abstract artists they thought were interesting, narrow their list down to the one most personally intriguing,…