A Visual Arts Process Portfolio

IB Process Portfolio Examples

As we get closer to the IB Art exhibition and exam season my students are busy putting the final touches on their Process Portfolio screens. An IB Visual Arts Process Portfolio is an excellent tool for students who wish to demonstrate their artistic skills. It also serves as a teaching tool for teachers. Although I appreciate the opportunity for reflection that creating these screens affords students, I still much prefer the raw visual qualities of their Art Journal pages to the digitally composed screens they will turn into IB. There is something of the true process, the human touch and the wanderings that every artists goes through while creating that is lost in these finished digital files.  In 2014 the IB Visual Arts course was redesigned and these PP screens are part of the new course - both my colleague and I struggle with the feeling that something is lost in translation when students go to transform the raw material of their journals to screens.  To combat this we collaborated extensively to help guide students to deeply engage with the process of reflection (the upside of this!) and to give them a map for how artists go about making art so they can arrange their pages in a way that tells the story of their process.  This has made a tremendous improvement in my students PPs this year. 

Teaching IB Art Process Portfolio Skills

We gave students this color coded map of the stages in the cycles of the creative process. We discussed how these stages do not always follow the same chronological order but that as an artist we do work these stages in our process. We looked at examples of students from past years journal pages and categorized them in small groups and shared out, backing up our categorization with evidence from the pages. Then students were given color stickies (from the Dollar Tree- score!) to tag their art journal pages as fitting into one of these stages. So for example for pages where they are just beginning to come up with ideas- mind maps, brainstorming, mood boards, journaling exercises, collections of reference images etc... they would mark the page with a yellow tag for "wandering." Students also received a handout adapted from the IB PP rubric to help them understand how each of these stages fit in with the IB Visual Arts requirements/ assessment.  Another thing we did differently this year is that we did a workshop on how to use the special features in Google Slides. A tech specialist in our district showed us some of the design features- creating semi transparent backgrounds, text box shapes, cropping/masking and color choices. We passed this along this information to our students and had students make over a lack-luster slide using these features. 

Here are some examples of A student's workbook pages for a few different investigations. 

And here is how the slides turned out. I am very happy with the results and although I do still really love the art journal pages these slides do retain some of the hand touched / raw quality that make the pages so compelling.