Aimee Carmella
Art Educator & Designer
Art Educator & Designer
I received my BFA in 2006 with a minor in art history from The College of New Jersey. Upon graduation, I worked as a photographer's assistant, web producer, and co-founded a web design and development firm. After a few years in a job that gave me the opportunity to teach clients how to use software, I realized that I had a passion for teaching people how to do things.
The only component missing from this was art. Working with individuals with varying skill-sets made it necessary for me to be flexible in my teaching approach. I am a 2015 graduate of the MAT program at Maine College of Art. My artwork – mainly digital photography - is inspired by my desire to depict beauty in everyday life.
My goals as an art educator are:
To provide students with a safe environment where they can learn
about materials, tools, and techniques.
To show students how to describe, analyze, interpret, and judge work,
so that they can better understand and connect to the art they are viewing.
To remember that creativity is paramount, and that students come with
an abundance of it.
To gently guide students' creativity so that they may produce
unique works of art imbued with meaning.
A high school unit plan focusing on how visual artists use images, symbols, and words to convey meaning.
This lesson was featured at the 2015 National Art Educator's Convention in New Orleans, LA. More information available from MECA's website.
In this unit, students will familiarize themselves with street art/graffiti - style art culture, the artists such as Banksy, Keith Haring, and Basquiat who were/are known for their street art, and will discuss the implications of making this controversial art. Students will look at political campaign posters of the past (Obama Hope poster), as well as war propaganda images and discuss power of image. Students will develop an understanding of how visual artists use symbols and words to convey meaning. Building on this knowledge, students will photograph each other in “headshot” style and edit photographs in Photoshop to create high contrast black and white images that will be printed and traced onto acetate and stencilled onto a canvas. They will add layers to their canvas via additional stencils, and words or a slogan that they identify with which positively demonstrates environmental, political, or social relevancy.
An interdisciplinary writing and art lesson for a broad age group.
This lesson was produced for a workshop at The Telling Room, a drop-in writing center in Portland, Maine. Students created abstract works in pastel with cardboard stencils, creating negative and positive spaces in the composition. After they created these unique landscapes, they composed a poem utilizing adjectives that their fellow participants identified in their work.
An introduction to complementary colors.
This lesson was produced for third and fourth graders as an introduction to complementary colors and optical illusions. Students begin with an after-image experiment, discuss what complementary colors are, and go on to design a unique complementary color wheel.
High school students are challenged to create works of art that communicate meaning.
This lesson is aimed at high school students to create a mixed media work using a map as the basis for exploration. The map must be altered from its original form and incorporated into the artwork in a meaningful way.
