Psalms Illustrated according to ninth graders

School officially ended on June 3rd for me.  Hooray!  Lucky for me, my seniors were finished the Friday before, so I've only had my 9th grade Fundamentals of Art class at the end of the day this past week.  (Art History and Home Ec were done.)  Can I just tell you how much I love ninth graders?!?!  They never cease to surprise me.  Despite a lot of whining and unkindness towards each other (which causes them to lose daily points for the day...yes, I'm a mean teacher that demands they respect each other), they are pretty great kids.

This year, I made my students do a little journaling for the first 15 minutes of class. Every Tuesday and Thursday, they would have to open up their Bibles and sketchbooks and illustrate a Psalm, write out a verse, and a lesson they learned from it.

(So no, I haven't totally abandoned my "Psalms Illustrated."  I just make other people do it now too.)  :o)

For their final project, they had to make a Psalms Triptych- a 3 part work of art that is tied together with a central theme.  They had to choose 3 of the about the 25 Psalms they did and find three that went together somehow (in theme, in content, in color, etc.).  Then they had other stipulations like it had to include a face, three implied textures, an example of a complementary color, deep space created with aerial or 1 point perspective, the use of two media (colored pencil, pastel, watercolor, graphite pencil, etc.) ... all the little lessons I taught them throughout the semester.

I tend to give assignments that I wish I could do myself.  There is a lot of whining and hemming and hawing about how difficult they think it is, but once they all had their idea, it was so fun watching their artwork come together.

I am so proud of them all!  I love seeing what they've learned, and how they apply it visually.  I pray that the lessons that they've learned from having to sketch out an idea as opposed to just memorizing verses (which they all have to do for Bible classes) will stick with them and God will use it to continually teach them about who He is.

Here are just a few of them.