Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Miro Men (and women!)

I look forward to this project every year.  Our students looked at the art of Joan Miro and we began looking into how abstract art works.  Students studied several of Miro's pictures, then designed their own Miro-like person.





Rousseau Lions

After studying the life and work of Henri Rousseau, our third graders created their own jungle art and overlapped layers of jungle to hide their lions.  Some of these are amazing, and the students worked very hard on them!







Second Grade OP Art

Second graders are just beginning to learn about OP Art this year.  We will be looking at two projects to further study how optical illusions can be created by using colors, lines, and shapes.  For this lesson, we traced our hands and created straight lines to the hand, then bent the lines as they go across the hand.  This is a pretty neat way to make the hand look like it's popping out at you!  Here are some finished projects.




Monday, February 13, 2012

Viva Valentine!

These last few classes, we have been celebrating Valentine's Day through our art and music!  Many grades learned some new Valentine songs and we incorporated some art vocabulary review into our Valentine projects!  Here are a few from each grade
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First Graders learned about warm colors and used them for the sky, they used cool colors to color in the hand.  We added a little glitter around the heart for some sparkle!


Second grade made Valentine trees that we painted with black paint, then worked on cutting out small colorful hearts for leaves, and mounted them on a Valentine-colored paper.
The third graders worked on positive and negative space hearts.  We used two colors (white and red) of paper and made the hearts on one side show positive space and on the back show negative space.  When you flipped over the heart, you saw the opposite colors on the other side!  I know it sounds complicated, but it really wasn't too bad.


The forth grade learned about an old style of art called quilling.  It's been around for hundreds of years, but historically, only the rich could do it because colored paper was so expensive!  Now we can easily do the art of paper rolling, and the kids were so creative with their cards!














 Fifth grade used watercolor pencils to make a tie-dye effect on their pictures.  Watercolor pencils are AMAZING because it's watercolor paint all closed up cleanly inside of a colored pencil.  Just color, add water, and you have a painting with very little mess!








 I am so proud of all of our students on their projects.  What a cool way to celebrate Valentine's Day!

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Where the Wild Things Are

Where are the wild things? They're doing their wild rumpus in art class!  Check out these Wild Things created by our first graders!