Art class at Moision - professional painter teacher

Art class (Jarmo Lepistö)

The art students of the school are a lucky group to have a professional painter teach them! Jarmo works away in France and Germany from time to time and hold exhibitions abroad. He must be a great role model for students to look up to - a teacher with his own hobbies and interests to pursue in life. It's a pity I haven't been able to see more of the way he teaches other than the basic instruction of theories and methods about graphics.

I could see that he first taught the theories, and then told them several possible methods, and showed them model products that previous students have made. He also demonstrated the technique on the blackboard very roughly by sketching the drawing.

It reminded me of ex-libris, which is what I once did for my secondary school art classes.

Jarmo has his own website where you can admire his paintings.

Students' art works at Meilahden yläasteen koulu

Marida has explained four areas in teaching fine arts: self expression through different mediums, design (glasses shown), and architecture (houses), art history, visual communication (eg film, photography).

Available facilities: ceramics, pottery, printing, black room for photography, film making, sculpture.

This school also offers a special Arts programme which has its admissions tests.

I suppose they are self-explanatory.

Fine Arts class at Meilahden ylaasteen koulu (secondary)

Fine arts (Marida)

Marida was teaching water colour painting. She started with theories with some very colourful pictures as instruction of different steps to take. All the students were copying down the words on the slide. Some were also drawing as they copied. Teacher emphasised basic techniques. She said students wanted to learn the basic techniques and were not confident themselves. This was confirmed by the attention the students showed!

Teachers handed them copies of animals like reindeers and birds, and students chose what they liked to draw from.

Teacher asked them to do some practice in a column and most students did that in a very nice way, making a spectrum of one colour.

She intentionally gave them only three colours for each student to mix the colours and get what they liked.

In the theories bit, the teacher showed slides about sketches of the landscape before water colour painting starts. Only one Finnish girl managed to do that and oh she was so very interested in art that she would blend the colours very nicely even when cleaning up. I could tell she would have loved to keep painting and the lesson was too short for her. Her friend tidied up her things for her when they had to go!

The teacher said to them that it is meaningless to keep doing what they already know, and they should try harder. it is only through struggling that they learn. I didn't expect that! She said students give up too easily now.