As many of you know I teach Art and PE at my small school in addition to my work in the 2nd and 3rd grade class. We switch specials every quarter, so my time with the kiddos is honestly very limited, with art it is extremely challenging to get a project done in a month. However, here are some of the things we have been working on...
In K/1 we talked about Salvador Dali and his bird-legged-elephants we discussed the difference between realistic and imaginary. We then got to work on our own imaginary animals, often combining characteristics of two or more animals into one creature.
We spent a class session drawing our animals on "giant" pieces of paper and were able to discuss scale and composition.
And then we were able to get started with painting our master pieces.
In 2/3 we have a bunch of different projects going. Above, one is working on painting a portrait, similar to Picasso but not too extreme, and another is working on optical illusion coloring. The optical illusions proved to be far more of a challenging project than I had imagined. We only worked with two colors and focused on positive and negative space and shapes, coloring alternate sections, alternate colors. Some are turning out better than others...
Another optical illusion project, and the works of a cursive name monster. With the monsters students had to write their name in cursive and trace around to make it fatter and then cut out and create a monster with their name. For the monsters we talked about colors that compliment one another... some got it.
A wonderful example of the optical illusion piece, a student really taking their time and concentrating. Also a great example of a name monster.
Another portrait painting (we did these without drawing in pencil first and this is making some students very nervous) and another optical illusion.
The 4/5/6 grade class is working on realistic portraits and we've been hard at work on those for some time. Unfortunately, I don't yet have any pictures of their work... Hopefully I'll remember this week.
I also would like to take some pictures of finished work that I already have on display.
As a recap: here are my personal favorites from our Henri Matisse inspired works that the whole school did a variation of.
K/1 colored the reverse side of 2 pages of shapes in order to make their families
2/3 made construction paper collage backgrounds and then painted a single sheet of paper to then cut out shapes to form a picture. They had to make their pictures with just that one sheet of paper.
4/5/6 had the option to paint the background and then cut out construction paper shapes as below
or they could do the same technic as we did with 2/3.
