5th Grade Foreshortening

5th grade students learned about creating artwork that demonstrates how they would look if they were "falling" away from or toward the viewer of their art. Here are 2 videos to showcase the hard work they did.

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Paint Monsters!!!

1st Graders have been going monster crazy! First the wild things came to visit, now we're being attacked by paint monsters! Students used watered-down tempera paint to choose their monster colors, and we used straws to blow the colors across the paper instead of a brush! Each piece is unique, and the addition of construction paper collage pieces adds personality! I hope you enjoy them as much as the kids loved making them!

Last OP Art of the Year!

Our 3rd graders have been working hard on their OP art circle projects, I was so impressed I took lots of pictures of them! We began by making a grid, then added about four circles that will pop out at you and students chose their alternating colors themselves. I was really impressed how quickly everyone caught on and look at the great results!

4th Grade Shading Sneakers

Our 4th graders have been working hard learning about hatching, cross-hatching, and stippling. They did their best to recreate their own tennis shoes using these shading methods instead of colors. Here's how some of them turned out!

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First Animoto Video

I recently learned of a neat way to add some sparkle to student artwork on display!  Animoto lets you take pictures you have saved on your computer (or other file sharing services) and place them into a video complete with animation, music, and text!  It took me about five minutes to plop this one together this morning, but WOW!  I can't wait to make some more!  Enjoy!

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

Special thanks to Leslie Shamblin for showing our school how EASY this is to use!

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.

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!