Kindergarten Still Life Studies

Pencil Sketch, ink outline and watercolor pencils.

Tree of Life (Part 2)

Third Grade: “Tree of Life” watercolor paintings. Part one: object printing with found objects and black paint (see previous post!) Part two: embellishing with an assortment of watercolors. I found glitter watercolors and metallic watercolors, both added great surface textures. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway…I’m yet to meet an elementary student who doesn’t enjoy a dab of glitter.

Van Gogh inspired Sunflowers

 The First Grade Students have been busy creating still life paintings based on Van Gogh's Sunflower painting. We started the unit by studying Van Gogh's life, works of art, and painting process. The students really enjoyed this video I found on YouTube: Van Gogh Portraits We then created "Impasto" paint by combining sawdust and tempera paint together into a thick, chunky substance. I mixed the paints to begin with, but as the unit went on I allowed the students to decide if the paint needed more sawdust, or water and allowed them to mix it as needed (a "pinch of sawdust" or a "squirt" of water) -- -- they loved doing this. I set up a sunflower still life in the classroom and we talked about foreground, mid ground, and background and how to make each section stand out, but function together as a whole. Before adding paint the first graders "sketched" their sunflower still life including five flowers. Prior to sketching we talked about the life cycle of a flower and acted out a happy sunflower, as well as a sleeping sunflower and they decided they can look differently. The finishing touches included adding sunflower seeds using a "sandwich" technique: glue, sunflower seeds, glaze coating.

First Grade Planted a Rainbow

First Grade created beautiful flower collages inspired by the book, Planting a Rainbow by Milwaukee's Lois Elhert. As you can see, there is a theme in the art room-- the First Grader's also kicked off the start of the school year by studying color. After we read the book I placed a paint try on each table with a big glob of white tempera and a big glob of blue tempera and some sponge squares. We talked about how the sky can look many different ways depending on weather, and each sky painting will look different, and left it at that to see what they came up with. The next class period they added the "color wheel" pedals and the other plant parts using different methods that they discovered throughout the class period. I was impressed by the individuality of each flower. While reflecting on the past two weeks, I have discovered something we need to work on in the room- there is no right or wrong answer! From Kindergarten, all the way up to Fourth Grade I have student's asking "is this right?" "how am I doing?" Which is fine sometimes, but I would like to work on decision making skills and self confidence.  Onto Kandinsky!

Tissue Paper Flowers

Happy Spring! These tissue paper flowers are simply layered tissue paper on wax paper. Tissue paper is a great medium for any age and can easily be used in place of wet mediums.  The thin layers of paper offer a wonderful light quality in a window and a fun experiment with color mixing for little people, and big people too!

window farms

Today's inspiration: window farms. Stumbled upon this yesterday, very interesting. Check out the website: http://www.windowfarms.org/ I have done some hydroponics in the past, but only in a tank with fish. Has anyone else tried something like this, any advise?