Art News You Can Use - September 2019

We have had a busy month working on lots of fun projects - here are a few highlights and some sneak peeks of what's coming up!

Kindergarten artists are finishing up their color mixing activity and have enjoyed the Mouse Paint book. Fifth grade assistants have been incredibly helpful with teaching our littlest artists the art room procedures.

We also enjoyed our Vooks presentation of They All Saw a Cat, followed by a drawing activity from different points of view. Vooks video books is offering a free trial for teachers - thank you!

First graders have finished their primary popsicle paintings and are ready to learn about portraits!

Second grade is continuing with the Matisse theme but switching media - moving from collage to window view paintings.

Third grade has just finished batik - read all about it in my previous post :) Observation drawing up next.

Fourth grade has completed their food truck designs and are experimenting with Ellsworth Kelly's abstract style. Kelly's work is currently being featured on a US postage stamp. Food truck lesson was inspired by @elementaryartists ' Instagram post. We used reading & writing language while creating our settings and details.

Fifth grade is creating their own camouflage designs, soon to be unique paintings. No pics yet, but we looked at examples of artists who use camo, like Warhol and Liu Bolin.

I was named a top tweeter for my school and earned new flair for my lanyard - hooray!

   

I enjoyed a day with second grader Peyton, who was Art Teacher for the Day - we had a great time.

Looking forward to getting our digital portfolios on Artsonia up and running for the new year in the next couple of weeks - stay tuned!

Watermelon batik, 3rd grade

This is our second year making paper batiks featuring watermelons - it has been a very successful project and involves lots of fun steps. We began the lesson by making some thumbnail sketches of a variety of watermelon forms, and then we combined the forms together on a thick piece of drawing paper. Batik is a very old method of decorating fabric, and we can create the same look on paper using wax crayon and watery paint. It’s important to press hard when coloring to create a thick, waxy layer and then gently crinkling the paper to create cracks in the wax for the dye to sink into. Finally, we cover the paper with watery tempera and then rinse in the sink, revealing the texture of the cracks in the wax. Thank you to @artedallthetime for your inspiring Instagram post.

Kitten's First Full Moon by Kindergarten

This was a fun first lesson for my youngest artists! We started with this wonderful book by Kevin Henkes and discussed the importance of illustrations in a book to help tell the story - in this case, the story of a kitten chasing the moon because he thought it was a bowl of milk.

After discussing the neutral colors of the book to represent nighttime, we drew a large circle using a tracer and a variety of lines and shapes below for the flowers and grass. We traced and colored with white and black crayon, then washed over the whole page with black watercolor. The next week, we drew the shapes for a cat and bubble cut around her, finally gluing her in the middle. 

I had a couple of fifth grade volunteers help me with each class and it was so wonderful having a few extra capable hands to guide my new kindergarteners as we learn routines in the art room. I'm going to take advantage of this scheduling situation as long as I can! 

Thanks to @primaryartwithmrsgenna on Instagram for the lesson idea!