Saturday, September 28, 2013

Kinder Pop!



The definition of Pop Art that I use in my elementary classroom is "to turn an ordinary something into an extraordinary something." Everyday subjects like food, sneakers, or even the alphabet can go from boring to exciting by making them big and colorful. Another way we can make it exciting is to repeat our shapes again and again. We really had a ball making these Jasper Johns inspired, multi-layered, painted & printed, alphabet pop paintings.
First, we stuck on foam alphabet stickers, all around the page. Great deals on these at the dollar store. Then we reviewed our mixing of secondary colors from the previous lesson, this time with tempera. They looooved that part. We threw in a few shapes and numbers too while painting, because it was one of those experimental moments with lots of ooohs and aaahs.


Next, we added white to our mixing trays to learn how tints are made, and began filling the page with as many tints as we could make. It's important with this step to remind them to tap their rinsed brush on the sponge, so dirty water doesn't go into their mixtures. "Rinse, tap, dip."





Last is the best part - stamp printing with our new sponge stampers from Roylco, which are amazing. Very sturdy sponge material and a thick cut to prevent shape distortion when little hands are stamping. I can tell these will last a while. This set has generously sized capitals and lower case, although we only used the lowers here because our paper size was not too big.

 






Good stuff -  I would call these letters extraordinary!










Thursday, September 26, 2013

First graders make portraits and still lifes

First graders have been having fun using lines, shapes and overlapping in our latest creations - family portraits and apple still lifes. I especially love the combination of the soft watercolor wash backgrounds and the colored, cut apple shapes together - these compositions were inspired by a post at MaryMaking, as well as the art of Matisse and Cezanne. Enjoy!


































Tuesday, September 24, 2013

3rd grade Bridgescapes


3rd graders created these beautiful mixed media landscapes focusing on famous bridges. We made thumbnail sketches of several, then selected one to enlarge and paint with a selected color scheme. Crayola construction paper crayons finish off the details. Beauties!




















Sunday, September 22, 2013

Pigeon Paintings


 

This funny story, Mo Willems' "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus," was the kindergarteners' introduction to drawing using combined shapes.  After we assembled our rectangles, circles, and triangles into pigeons, we learned about primary and secondary colors and sampled them in watercolor. We learned much about craftsmanship and using painting materials correctly, and some classes had a little extra time for adding crayon textures.  This project always comes out fun and colorful!












Saturday, September 21, 2013

Rad Bikes, '13




This lesson has proven to be really successful with all my 5th grade students, and covers the standards of using thumbnail sketches and viewfinders, understanding positive/negative space, and creating color schemes. The pic above has the most sublime monochromatic sky - if I picked favorites, this may have to be it, so dramatic! Here are some shots that show our development.