Choice Art offers a new opportunity for students to explore materials and techniques as they so choose.  The difficuly for some students is simply figuring out what to do!  Here are some suggestions to get your creative juices flowing.  Look around you at colors, textures, patterns and lines.  You need to do research...VISUAL RESEARCH!  What looks cool to you?  What intrigues you?  Dig though books and magazines and snip out things that catch your eye.  Make a page in your sketchbook without giving it much thought - fill that page with your collection of eyecatching bits and pieces.  Now, look at the page and see where it takes you.  Start doodling...fill a page with doodles.  Can you put the two things together?  Take some 3D bits and manipulate them into different forms.  How could you add those forms to your collection of eyecatching bits and your page of doodles?  Add a poem.  Add words.  Tear something.  Fold, paint, rework. 

Remember to look at the links on the left side of this page.  There are sites with lesson plans that include instructional videos to guide you into new arenas.  Look at the Blick site under lesson plans (they aren't just for teachers)!  Lots of those lesson plans have videos.  Look at a few of them and figure out how you can personaliza that project  and make it your own.

Challenge yourself and get put of your comfort zone.  Stop doing things that you know how to do!  Take artistic risks!  Fail once in awhile...there really is no failure in ART - you are learning all the time.