6th Grade: Glue Line Pumpkins

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Here are some pumpkins created by sixth grade. They used black glue to draw the lines and watercolor to paint. 

5th Grade: Silhouette Art

To try and learn more about who my students are, the fifth graders started the year off with this silhouette project. The students first learned what a silhouette is.

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The students create a black and white border, a silhouette drawing of themselves using a photograph, and filled it in with drawings to describe themselves. Drawing a silhouette outline of a face is not easy, but you can see that some of the students really captured their profile. 

2nd Grade: Wayne Theibaud Cakes

The second grade students learned about the artist Wayne Thiebaud. We took a look at some of his cake paintings, which made us all very hungry!

We also learned what it means for something to be SYMMETRICAL. The students and I listed a few symmetrical things we could think of (butterfly, leaves, etc.) Then the students created SYMMETRICAL cake stands to put their cakes on! The students made their SYMMETRICAL cake stands by folding a piece of paper in half, drawing their design, cutting it out, and then opening the paper. 

The students used oil pastel to create whatever beautiful cakes they wold like. 

Kindergarten: Color Wheel Flowers

The Kindergarten students learned about our PRIMARY colors and our SECONDARY colors. I was so impressed with how quickly the students memorized which colors were which. The students painted pieces of paper using their primary and secondary colors that they would eventually use for their flower petals. After cutting out the flower petal shapes and decorating the background came the tricky part, getting the colors in order. We talked about how YELLOW and BLUE make GREEN. RED and YELLOW make ORANGE. BLUE and RED make PURPLE. This helped the students to remember the order of the color wheel. We also watched this video a few time to help us.

Color Wheel Video

5b: Drawing Leaves From Observation

As an artist, it is a very important, yet challenging skill to draw from observation. I discussed with the students what drawing from observation is, drawing what is right in front of you, not from memory or a photograph. Since it is the beautiful time of year, fall, we used the fall leaves to draw. The students chose four or five leaves and cut them in half right down the middle. We talked about how leaves are usually have symmetrical sides, so  the students were trying to draw the other half of the leave matching the best they could. I think some of these really turned out interesting. The students quickly learned how challenging it is to draw from observation, trying to get every curve and edge of the leaf.

3rd Grade: James Rizzi Skylines

             James Rizzi is a New York artist who transforms the New York skyline into a happy animated painting. The third grade students looked at these two paintings of James Rizzi's, and then created their own paintings based off them.



            The students had a few requirements. They needed to have at least six buildings in their painting, they needed to have buildings over lapping, the buildings could not all be the same shape, the buildings needed faces, and they needed the skyline to go from edge to edge of the paper. That is a lot for a third grader to remember, but they turned out great.
           Third grade first drew out their skylines with pencil. They then went over their pencil with Sharpie. Last, they painted the skyline using water color paints.

2nd Grade: Warm and Cool Colors Corn

Second graders learned our warm colors (red, yellow, and orange) and our cool colors (blue, green, and purple). To help us remember we thought of things that were the warm colors and hot. Such as, the yellow sun. red hot lave, and the way the coils on our stove turn red when they heat up. We also talked about cool things that are our cool colors, such as the cool blue and green ocean.
We used the warm colors to paint the multi colored Indian corn and the cool colors for the background.

1st Grade: Fall Reflections

This fall themed project is so much fun to do with the young kids, and is also great for learning about reflection and symmetry! The students and I looked at this photo of fall trees reflecting on the water.

We discussed what we saw in the photo, about how we knew there was water in front of the trees and why we see the images of the trees repeated on the water.

The students created their fall landscape using tempera paints. I demonstrated how we can fold a piece of paper in half to transfer the image onto the other side. The students painted the grass and trees one class. The next class they used blue watercolor to add the sky and water colors. We then went over top of all of that with fall colors to make the leaves on the trees. The students and I talked about how it was important to continue folding the paper before the paint dries to transfer the image.

These paintings tuned out beautiful! Some were even a bit abstract.