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!
