Warm & Cool

Warm and Cool collage/paintings by the kindergartners. Objectives of this lesson: Develop a solid understanding of the warm and cool color families (ability to create a work of art using only one family) ability to make connections between colors & our environment and ability to tear shapes of paper with control...we're still working on this fine motor skill :)

The Lion and The Rat

Inspired by another wonderful Brian Wildsmith story, The Lion and The Rat, kindergartners created lions for Family Arts Night at Swallow. 3rd and 4th grade students helped design and hang a jungle mural to display their work. I found a great children's book review blog, check it out here: http://theartofchildrenspicturebooks.blogspot.com/  and Brian Wildsmith's website: http://www.brianwildsmith.com/

Self Portraits -4th Grade

Oil pastel self portraits by the 4th graders, created using the gridding technique. photo 8 x 10, drawing 16 x 20. Great job guys and gals!

Creole Cottages

Popsicle sticks, toothpicks, cardboard, pom poms, pipe cleaners, tag board templates (to create 4 walls) scrap tag board to create architectural design elements & yard elements. We looked closely at New Orleans creole cottages for inspiration. My students really enjoyed this project--we set up a series of these homes for Family Arts Night in rows similar to the streets of the French Quarter!

Student Architects

Kindergarten focused on architecture this week, creating buildings in our community from wooden blocks. Students works in teams to build a structure of choice, then we did a gallery tour and each team presented their creation to the class (talk about wild imaginations!) Next, students recorded their creations by drawing a version of their still life structure on paper. This activity led into the next portion of the unit which was building our school from construction paper shapes and materials in a collage-like format. The focus of this unit was to look, describe and translate shapes into recognizable buildings in their environment. Wow, do kindergarten boys like to build with blocks!
"...probably the best day in art, ever!" - kinder

Kinder Collages

Inspired by paper dolls, the kindergartners created a collage of their family. They created a background and frame to start. Then, traced people and cut them out added clothing and accessories with drawing materials and/or paper collaging techniques. We also worked on titles and names.The most tricky part of the was tracing and cutting out the people (some lost some body parts along the way!) Next year I would probably make this a 3D project and have each student create a stage or room for their paper doll people to inhabit.

Picasso Inspired 1St graders

Look closely, do you see a face?! I do!

Loosen up, get those creative juices flowing. Great Picasso warm up silly face drawing activity from Scholastic art submission. Check it out! http://art.scholastic.com/

Following silly face warm up, I did a demo on taking ideas from multiple sketches and creating a final oil pastel drawing on a large sheet of paper. I actually pulled ideas during the demo from their drawings... which was interesting trying to recreate a child's drawing, not as easy as it sounds! ha!

Students created their own 10 x 20 inch Picasso inspired face- then folded. numbered into four parts, and cut! Students kept their own number 1 and...

...dropped 2, 3, and 4 into the boxes. This was challenging for some students (correct number on each piece of the drawing, cutting into four pieces, and dropping it in the correct box.. but we're learning!) Also, some students had trouble detaching themselves from their original drawing. This was a good introduction to collaborative artworks, and well.... sharing!

Students then took turns drawing a mystery facial features from each box to create a new mixed up, jux-ta-posed portrait. I heard a lot of funny comments during this activity such as, " oHhhH! _______, I got your nose!" Once the students arranged their facial parts in an  appealing order, they glued.

Construction paper mosaic tiles for frame.

Then students added more oil pastel- some students were missing a nose, maybe an eye.. good opportunity to "doctor it up!" They loved that.

Next, we watercolored. We used traditional, glitter, and Metallic watercolors. So fun. (we did this step for two days, allowing the watercolor to dry and be layered up adding interesting texture.)

Last step, a Mosaic border... framing all of a specific element of their drawing- very interesting choices as this stage in the project. We focused on patterns.

Love the metallic watercolors!

This is in my top picks for favorite lessons this year, so fun. It took us about 6 class periods.