Cave paintings DONE

Well. The hunks of cave 'rock' are dry and painted. We used a combination of school acrylics, and charcoal. The caves are closed up for another year, the flashlights are turned off, and the students are ready to return to the 21st century.

Today, the students each made a 'signature' with their hand on a large sheet of brown Kraft paper, either by stamping it, or sponging around it for a stenciled look.

The hand-printed Kraft paper was used as the background for the bulletin board. Here it is, all together!

Random Views from a Busy Week in the Art Room

More cats underway. I like the whiskers on the cat on the left. The green one in the center is the largest of all the cats, and has cougar pawprints on it - our team mascot is the Cougar and our school colors are green and gold. But the sad story about this cat is that it will have to wait at least a couple of weeks to receive eyes and to be completed. The boy who is making it, an athletic, exuberant, outgoing, fun sort of boy, tripped in a running game outside in gym class (during last week's run of summer weather) and severely broke his arm. I mean the bone broke in at least 2 places and slipped down inside his arm, and he had surgery done and will be out for a while, and when he's back it will be with a cast right up to his shoulder. And this is of course his right arm, and he's right-handed, and baseball season is starting, and he's a HUGE baseball player. Poor kid.

The unfinished yellow cat below (love the tilt of the head) has an Autism Awareness ribbon on its back, in honor of the sweet younger brother of the lovely girl making the cat.

Below is "camo-cat". The next two cats are really intriguing - can't wait to see how they will look when complete!

Here's a cave painter entering a cave through a tunnel...

And below are a couple of the annual kindergarten thumbprint pussywillows. The color is all wrong on the photo on the right but I can't correct it somehow. The paint was a pale silvery gray and the paper was pink. I forgot to photograph the rest. I took some better photos last year and posted them here. Process was the same, but I used a different size/shape paper this year (longer and narrower) because I had extremely tall real pussywilllows to show the kids.

Painting of teddy bear chairs is underway!

And finished kitties have been moved to the library for display. This is how I've made room for the teddy bear chairs and the garden gnomes (which I'll show you more of in a couple of days.)

Busy busy busy!

It's the 4th grade annual cave adventure!

Huh? Where is everybody??

Oh. There they are.

Fourth graders are in 'caves' under my tables. The caves are made with sheets of cardboard and big pieces of fabric, and flashlights are their torches.

Today 4th graders were practicing drawing animals while in their caves. In their next art class they'll go back into the caves where they will paint their animals directly on those hunks of cave wall that they made.

Making our hunks of cave wall

This is our 'glop'- shredded paper, moistened w/water, and then saturated with dog drool (Art Paste) and an added hit of Elmer's Glue-All.

I gave a big handful of glop to each 4th grader, and for the next half hour, while we took a virtual tour of the Lascaux cave and looked at images from Chauvet as well, they pounded, twisted, kneaded, and 'worked' the glop into paper clay. And YES, they are doing it DIRECTLY on the table surface. With several minutes left, they each flattened their glop into a big pancake, and inserted a paper clip in the top for hanging. Once they were put away for drying, they used scrubbers and sponges and gave the tables a good cleaning.

We made them rather large this year, and I'm not sure they would have dried fast enough, but it has been - GASP - 80 degrees outside! My classroom windows open onto a flat roof covered with stones. The sun has been bright and the roof is hot enough to fry an egg, and so I leaned out the windows and set the hunks of cave wall on the rocks to dry in the sun.

It's so warm that things are blooming way earlier than usual, and the robins are outside chirping. It feels like July, but there are still 3 months of school left. I think it is making the kids a little wacky.


Tomorrow my fourth graders head into the caves. Hopefully that will take their minds off the summer weather outside. Meanwhile, construction of the teddy bear chairs is complete and 2nd graders are ready to start painting them, and my 3rd graders are about to begin the papier-mache on their garden gnomes. Busy busy busy!
Like a house of cards! Don't dare move a chair.

Cave paintings - DONE!

I must be blogoholic because I've been posting a LOT lately. But it seems like a bunch of artwork got done at once, and I wanted to get these photos off my camera and onto the computer, so this was a natural next-step.

These are "cave" paintings by my 4th graders, painted while sitting or lying on the floor in the dark under the tables, closed in by cardboard walls, working by the light of flashlights (as I showed in a prior post). Some of the paintings did not come out so great, probably because the kids couldn't see what the heck they were doing. Also, the surface of some of the "rocks" were a bit rough, if the student didn't knead his hunk of recycled paper glop enough before forming a patty. Anyhow, these individual photos are some of the BETTER pieces.

But no matter how the product LOOKS - I also had some kids tell me today that these were the BEST art classes of their life (though another child disputed that making a papier-mache tiki last year was pretty awesome too).

All I know is, changing the art room environment took a bit of time, effort, and planning to set up, but totally worth it. The kids think their work is great and will remember this project.
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Below is the entire bulletin board display. The handprints were done by the kids on brown paper hung on the wall. We were going to spray (stencil) some hands also, but my spray bottle kept clogging and dripping and we gave up on it and stuck to stamping the hands.

Where have all the children gone?

Where are the kids? Wait... I think I see one!


Welcome to the caves! My 4th graders have learned about Lascaux, and are now doing their artwork in art room caves. The lights are off, we have flashlights for torches, and a tape of nature sounds with thunderstorms, coyotes howling, birds singing, and wind blowing outside. What an honor it is to be able to sit on the floor under the table!

Some kids choose private caves,

and others prefer to work together.


Oh - and what are they doing? They are using vine charcoal and/or charcoal pencils, and selecting what animals to draw on their chunk of cave wall rock, practicing on newsprint paper first. In next art class, they will be back in the caves, and when done with the charcoal, they will be PAINTING the images on the rock with earthy colors.

This hunk of cave wall, incidently, was made from that shredded paper mix I posted a week or so ago. The kids squished and squashed it, breaking down the paper fibers, and in some cases added some brown or black paint to tint the rock. (You'll see these when the artwork is done.) After squishing it for a while, they "patty-caked" it into a flat rock, and inserted a paper-clip to hang it when dry. Now they are as hard as a real rock!!

More Surrealism - 2nd grade landscapes and clocks

The inspiration for this lesson came from a lesson posted here:

http://linesdotsanddoodles.blogspot.com/2010/01/dali-clocks-1st-grade.html

My 2nd graders looked at and discussed Dali's Persistence of Memory. Then we created our own distorted clocks on watercolor paper, outlined with Sharpie and painted with watercolors.

Next we created a simple landscape with 3 wavy lines, and painted by double-dipping 2 colors on our brushes. Then we used a Q-tip to paint some black trees and fences, using size and placement to show depth.

Finally, we cut out our clocks and glued them down, with a little bit of curve.