Northview Public Schools K-12 Visual Arts Program

Elementary Students love to paint! 4th graders get to paint on the walls of East Oakview. These two are adding more color to the Art Room wall. A donation of paint-by-number canvases were a hit as a choice station in the afternoon yesterday! Students agreed that these would be a great Christmas gift idea 😉

Today was Halloween on a Friday at a middle school when the kids have a long weekend ahead (teachers have a pd day Monday).

So, of course we did a little drawing of costumed kiddos! Why not add to the crazy by encouraging showing off? 😂

4th Graders at East Oakview have finished their contour tricycle drawings! They had to draw from observation from their own perspective. I bring in my own childhood ride for my students to look at. Here are a few of the great results:

Gory zombie arms were made in the Crossroads Art Club this week. Of course.

As promised earlier this week, here are some of the many stunners from the 7th and 8th grade choice drawing challenge.

They had to take or choose a photo to draw from (many chose their pets!), accurately use a grid to enlarge the image and capture the textures and at least 6-7 values using graphite on white paper or white/black color pencil on black paper. If you are in middle school, you’ll know how important “6-7” is.

One artist made three!!! Drawings to turn in for this challenge! So awesome.

Crossroads Art Club took advantage of the beautiful weather at Ambrose Pond today.

It was a great day to check out ArtPrize with over 250 Wildcats!

These Crossroads value skill builder drawings are “so cool”!

Artists are awesome!

When Susan Kare first walked into in the early 1980s, she wasn’t a computer scientist or an engineer—she was an artist with a background in fine arts and sculpture. What she brought to the Macintosh project was not a set of algorithms or lines of code, but an artist’s eye for simplicity, clarity, and whimsy. At a time when computers were largely intimidating, filled with green text on black screens, she helped make them feel friendly, almost human.

Her work was rooted in the idea that people should not need a manual just to use a machine. A trash can for deleting files, a paintbrush for drawing, a smiling face that greeted you when you turned on the Mac—these weren’t just graphics, they were a new visual language. Kare sketched many of her earliest designs on graph paper, carefully coloring in tiny squares that would become the building blocks of icons recognizable to millions. What seems obvious today—that symbols could guide us through technology—was radical then.

She once said she wanted the icons to be as simple and universal as road signs, instantly recognizable without words. That vision extended beyond symbols; she also designed fonts, some playful, some sleek, that gave the early Macintosh its distinctive personality. Her Chicago typeface, for example, became the voice of the first iPods decades later.

Susan Kare’s legacy is quiet but vast. Most of us never think about the origins of the icons we click or tap every day, but the language of computing she helped create still lives on in every interface. Her career went on to include work with , Facebook, and even Pinterest, yet it’s those first Macintosh sketches that defined her as one of the rare people who shaped how we see and interact with technology. She turned cold code into something approachable, proving that art and technology were never meant to be separate.

Today was a great day for making art! Northview’s art teachers gathered to prepare for the upcoming school year and to create matching indigo uniforms using the Japanese process of Shibori. 💙
Big shout out to Mrs. Einfeld for the hands on lesson!

Congratulations to our 7 Wildcats who have work on display at the West Michigan Youth Art Exhibition!

Congratulations to seniors Maddy Zimmer & Mylie Krull who were given the 2025 Northview Art Department Outstanding Artist Award.