It’s been a long time since I’ve made an actual full-scale painting. Like five years. That’s horrible.

I have been doing a lot of drawings, and one small watercolor painting for Vlady. Now I’ve finally completed a painting that I hope will lead to more painting activity. It helped that Vlady painted along with me this past Sunday, working on a still life of a rose from my garden. My painting is a little different from his. I mostly used photo references to come up with a semi-fantastical, very colorful scene.

“Bee Eater” by Dawn Pedersen, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 16″ x 20″

This painting is unlike any paintings I have done before, but a good deal like the chalk drawings I’ve been doing for the Chalk It Up event every year.

By the way, “Bee Eater” is the species of bird that’s there on the right.

Next up, I hope to start a portrait of Vlady. I have to pick my favorite face.

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Last month I started building a class website for the coming year. I’ll be teaching web design and graphic design. I didn’t spend a lot of time planning the design ahead of time. I just wanted to start getting some curriculum ideas down, growing and narrowing the scope of each class.

A week or so ago, I started really hating the original design I developed for the site. I’ve been reading some great books on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), especially about properly separating content from presentation in web coding. I’ve had some experience with CSS positioning before, but I had still used HTML table in my current site design.

I started realizing that I really wanted to teach my web design students all the best habits right from the beginning: DIVs rather than tables for structure, semantic naming conventions, accessibility, and all the proper web standards.

My site was not up to par, so I started again from scratch.

I’ve rolled out the new design tonight, and I am just in love with it.

Old design: nhsdesigns.com

New design: nhsdesigns.com

The new banner is composed of a logo I designed in Illustrator plus a photo I took of Red-legged Stilts at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I like how it ended up looking like an ultra-modern magazine.

I’m not too proud to show my students what mistakes I made, which is why I’m hanging onto the old design in archives.

Feel free to address any problems you see with usability.

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Teachers.net has been a fantastic resource for me in the past. It’s been the only one I can find to provide a specialized forum for art teachers. I’ve posted there a handful of times, and have read a great deal from other teachers. Art teachers are very generous with advice, resources and assistance.

About a year ago, I started toying with the idea of creating a place just for visual art teachers – not just fine art, but web design, graphic design and new media as well.

Today is its birthday: artteacherforum.com

No banner ads, no hidden motive, no spam. Just run by an art teacher (me) who couldn’t find exactly what she wanted on the web, so she made it herself.

Please let me know what you think. I welcome any suggestions for making it user-friendly and an exciting place to be: dawnsbrain@gmail.com

Art Teacher Forum

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Now that I have some sort of clue what I am teaching (actually, I was given little direction but pretty much free reign,) I’m building my courses for 2007-2008. I’m teaching thIee graphic design periods and two of web design. in coming years, the school hopes to offer intermediate and advanced classes. For now, I’m beginning from scratch with the students. All I can assume they come to class with is some knowledge of computers. Not a guarantee, though – I may need to partner up complete newbies with more seasoned computer users.

I spent about a week deciding what topics to cover in each course. That done, I’m fleshing it out a little more, especially the first few weeks. Rather than keeping it all to myself in handwritten notes or in Microsoft word, I’m building a website. This method has several benefits:

• It’s helping me organize my curricula and my thoughts.
• It will be a continuous resource for my students. As we go along, I will post assignments and quizzes and such.
• It’s refreshing my memory of XHTML coding and the use of Dreamweaver. I’ve been away from it for many months now.
• I can share my efforts and resources with other teachers (like you?).

This will be a constant work in progress. Many pages are yet empty, and many bullet points still not elaborated. Expect new information to be added on a regular basis. New assignments will likely be posted there before they are posted here.

Here’s the new site: NHSDesigns.com. Enjoy!

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