Woman With a Parasol

A prerequisite for becoming an art level teacher was to complete mentor observation hours alongside experienced middle and high school art teachers in the Amarillo school district. In my first semester, while observing a middle school classroom, my mentor teacher shared with me a yearly project she assigned to her students called “Art Trading Cards.” The aim was to encourage students to create and exchange artwork, similar to how one would trade baseball, football, or magic cards. To provide examples, she requested that I also create a few cards to share with the students. While her examples predominantly featured colored triangles, rectangles, and squares, I opted to make some that seemed to have a heightened intensity to them. Several students I was observing expressed interest in obtaining one, but as the demand grew, the class was instructed to trade among themselves. I held onto my examples and later digitized them, resulting in the artwork presented here.