Artist Portraits

Fourth grade did a large portrait unit that included shrinky-dink self-portrait pins, bobble head caricatures (which I'll post) and artist portraits. They selected an artist whose work they really liked and after learning some sketching/proportion basics, created some really awesome portraits! Their task for their backgrounds was to represent their artist's style in some way. 

Jasper Johns

Salvidor Dali

Janet Fish

Vincent Van Gogh

Chuck Close

Frida Kahlo

Wayne Thiebaud

Some Updates and Some Mexican Suns

Really looking forward to getting back on track with posting much more frequently now that the yearbook is finally finished and submitted!! Here's a few cool things coming up: I'm very excited to be attending the NAEA National Convention in Baltimore in a few weeks... I expect to have lots of great stuff to report back from that. After we get back from break, 5th grade is going to be starting a collaborative project with students at a school in Oaxaca, Mexico where a friend of mine is currently teaching art. We'll be setting up ongoing skype video chats for our classes as the project continues. Stay tuned...








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In the meantime, check out these AWESOME Mexican suns by 3rd graders! While working on this project, we learned about soo many art ideas: contrast, variety, mixing warm and cool colors (just to name a few). We had a lot of fun making these suns and I was especially impressed with how much personality students put into them. Enjoy!

*Credit: lesson was adapted from this one by paintedpaper.

Painted Worlds

This was one of the first lessons fifth graders worked on at the beginning of the year and was intended to give them some art history background. The project was to select a painting from a modern art movement and transform it from a 2D space to a "3D" diorama. Students had to pay special attention to the space in their painting while creating their foreground and backgrounds. They also tried to emulate their artist's style in parts of their work. Fifth graders seemed to really enjoy using the oil pastels to blend their colors and were also excited to use reductive methods to scratch away and add detail. At the end of the lesson, students were organized in groups based on which art movement their original painting was from. The groups then worked collaboratively to arrange their movements into a visual timeline and to present the main ideas of their art movement to the class.

* This lesson was partially inspired by this fantastic lesson by the very talented Ruth Chung. 

 

Deep Sea Creatures

Second graders learned about deep sea creatures with bioluminescent lights as they created a watercolor painting of their own 'newly discovered' creature. Students created diagrams to sketch out a design and label important features of their new creature. In their watercolor paintings, students learned about warm and cool colors and created contrast by selecting which to use for their foreground and background. They also used highlighters for their creature's bioluminescent light. At the end of the lesson, students became deep sea explorer. I turned off the lights as explorers took turns using  a black light to search for the bioluminescent lights - they were amazed to see the highlighters glowing  under the black light. I think maybe ocean sounds to enhance the effect next year.