Putting everything in PERSPECTIVE

Grades 3-5 have been trying different perspective techniques in their artwork to creat the illusion of space. These are lessons I return to again and again because they offer some personal choices and connections for the students while giving them technical experience.

Let's start with third grade - they researched and selected a bird whose habitat is here in our state of Georgia. We drew the birds in great detail because they were in the foreground of the picture, and then to create an atmospheric perspective we used watercolor and the wet on wet technique to create a blurry, out of focus background, much like a photographer might do.

Fourth grade made drawings called "shape explosions" which help them practice connecting shapes to a vanishing point using a straight edge.

Fifth grade went a step beyond and made drawings using two vanishing points on a horizon line, called two-point perspective.

Evergreen Forest Collagraph prints, 3rd grade

Winter (almost) greetings! This printmaking lesson is a tradition for my 3rd grade classes over the years because it is always fun, successful, and you can use a wide variety of materials. Search my blog for more examples from years past.

 This year, we used matboard that was donated by Artome, who frames our art show each year. We added different shapes of evergreen trees in a snowy ground, and a hole puncher is a great way to get the effect of berries, cones, or decorations. We used lacy paper doilies and scraps of printing foam - some other great materials to try are craft foam, yarn, corrugated paper, and sandpaper. Make sure the pieces are glued down well. I use Blick block printing ink - when the final print has been pulled, we dust the plate with a layer of sparkly clear glitter and it becomes its own work of art as well. A few of the final prints also have some blue ink mixed in because we were getting low on white and it turned out great! I think we will continue that happy accident in the future.

   

   

3rd grade mosaics

Texture was a featured element in our fall mosaics - we used glossy, colorful magazine pages for the mosaic pieces, with a fuzzy yarn outline and a soft chalk pastel background. Mosaic is a very old art form dating back to ancient times.