Final Collage Storytelling Design Prototype

Original Prompt: Students must make a 5-page comic using collage and mixed media methods. This would incorporate design, story-telling, and collage in one final project.

Analysis: I decided this prototype should be more open. Using the term "book," instead of "comic," can still create a narrative. In fact, the narrative for a collage book could provide more interesting results than the comic. For my prototype, I used line as a design element that unified my art project. I used collage, photos, colored paper, string, paint, and even sewing methods to construct my final prototype. My prototype explores my identity with memories of specific places. Each left page is a fragmented version of the combined photos on the right.

Curriculum Sketch 1: Collage Storytelling Design (Final Draft)

Design based off of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel & Matt Madden

Curriculum Sketch 1: Collage Storytelling Design (First Draft)

Essential Questions

The Night Cafe, 1888 by Vincent Van Gogh

Questions Asked for Discussion:
1. What do the brush strokes communicate? (Have students come close to observe the painting)
2. What colors do you see? Why are they there?
3. How do these elements make you feel?
4. Review the letter to Theo. Emphasize the descriptive elements Van Gogh uses.
5. Van Gogh considered this one of his ugliest paintings. Why would an artist create an ugly painting?
6. Share quote from the art critic.
7. Why would you want to show this painting to someone else? What value do you see in it?

Quotes Shared:
"In it, Aurier aligned Van Gogh's art "with the nascent Symbolist movement and highlight[ed] the originality and intensity of his artistic vision".²

In his review Aurier described Van Gogh as the only painter he knew "who perceives the coloration of things with such intensity, with such a metallic, gem-like quality", his work as intense and feverish, his brushstrokes as fiery, very powerful, his palette as dazzling, and said his technique matched his artistic temperament: vigorous and intense"

"Despite his countless post-Impressionist chefs-d’oeuvres, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime."
Letter to Theo: "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.”
Sources:
https://www.vincentvangogh.org/the-night-cafe.jsp
https://www.finearttips.com/2011/10/10-famous-artists-who-died-before-their-art-was-recognized/
https://www.thoughtco.com/first-reviewer-of-van-goghs-paintings-2578999