Wow, time has been flying by but all grades have been hard at work and busy in art class! Once International Dot Day wrapped up, we moved on to seasonal projects for Fall. Kindergarten was introduced to Folk Art, and drew and painted pumpkins. They did a water resist technique by drawing with crayons and painting over them with glitter water colors. The paint does not stick to the wax build up the crayons create and leaves a nice look when the color finds the little nooks and crannies in between the crayon strokes. How to draw a pumpkin was very basic, it is a great shape for Kindergarteners and the best part is because all pumpkins come in all shapes and sizes, there is no wrong pumpkin!
1st Grade did one of my favorite projects. Monsters!!! Not exactly seasonal and a fun project for any time of the year. I love this project. While they are creating them they always look very questionable on how they're going to end up but once they're finished, they always look amazing! They enjoyed using oil pastels to draw their monster's body and then they did the water resist technique as well using water colors to paint over their pastel drawings. Once they were dry they cut out the monsters, glued them to a black background and cut out eyes and mouths with black and white construction paper to give them a face. We have some awesome monsters hanging in the hall to welcome parents to conferences tomorrow!
2nd grade did another favorite project of mine. A night time perspective of fall trees. The challenge with this project was them drawing them from the perspective of standing near the tree looking up. A few wanted to add grass until they understood if you're looking up at a tree, you're not going to see the grass. They first drew the tree shape and full moon with black oil pastel. Then they painted the tree, moon, and sky with tempera paints. Because the tempera paints are on the thick side, they hid a bit of the black oil pastel. When they were dry students had to retrace their drawing and then added additional details to the tree truck. Those that had time were allowed to use black paper to make nocturnal animal shadows, mostly bats and owls. The final fun touch was adding some glitter to the full moons to give them a little extra sparkle in the night! They turned out awesome!
3rd Grade is just wrapping up their project inspired by the famous painting The Scream by Edvard Munch. They drew their own versions adding the twist of something that is causing the figure to scream. This was fun for them to do, especially when I pointed out that it did not necessarily have to be something frightening. That is when some silliness started coming out, teddy bears, hamburger and french fries, a baby. They really had fun with it. They drew in pencil and then traced it all with fine point Sharpies. The color was painted with metallic watercolors which made their pictures very shimmery. They were also instructed to use warm colors in the sky like Edvard Munch and cool colors for the water. More examples to come on this project as they wrap it up.
4th Grade did a new project for me this year. A contour cat watercolor project I found here, www.deepspacesparkle.com/contour-cat-watercolor-project/ . The project as I found it called for the complimentary colors of blue and orange, but I decided to give the students more choices. They still had to be complimentary colors but we looked at the color wheel and studied how complimentary colors are opposite each other on the wheel. They soon discovered they could also use purple with yellow, and green with red. With a drawing guide they made a basic cat shape using one contour line from start to finish. They also added eyes. When they were done drawing, they traced the cat shape with a white oil pastel along the outside of the black line drawing. They then painted the cats with the instruction that whatever color they chose, they had to use its complimentary color for the negative space around it (background) (blue/orange, orange/blue, green/red, red/green, purple/yellow, yellow/purple). After the paint dried they then added the nose and mouth and filled the cat with patterns, lines and shapes. They look great up in the halls by 4th grade!
As you can see, we're keeping busy in Art! Checkout more examples of these awesome projects by clicking the "Student Work" link above! Thanks for visiting!