Create your own Camouflage, 5th grade

This lesson was a challenge for my 5th graders to choose a setting and imagine a camouflage pattern that might blend in. We were inspired by the work of artist Liu Bolin, aka the Invisible Man. Can you find him in the images below? (Look for the feet)

  

Some of our settings were realistic and others more imaginative. We used a planning sheet to prepare our ideas and then blended lots of custom paint colors.

2nd grade Matisse unit:collage and painting

Second graders explored the art of French artist Henri Matisse and created a painting and a collage using his style. Our collages focused on shapes as in his vegetable and ocean collages – we began with geometric shapes and layered organic shapes on top. His style is very loose and abstract, so we remembered what we had learned from our book Ish about making “Ish- art”.

 Our paintings focused on an interior of a room with a window view. Students mix their own colors from primary colors and created tints with white. We enjoyed the freedom of painting without drawing first - very expressive.

Sunflower still lifes, 1st grade

Vincent Van Gogh's sunflowers are my go-to for teaching still life in first grade each year - also part of my Nouns in Art unit. We started with watercolor for the background and smoothed out our brush strokes. Next, we switched to liquid tempera and made bold strokes like Van Gogh. A couple of classes added some oil pastel strokes as well. Each and every one is a lively, colorful success!

I have a lesson plan for the still life and the Nouns in Art in my Teachers Pay Teachers store if you'd like to try it!

"Monster picture day" portraits, Kindergarten

So much good stuff is covered in this adorable and expressive lesson - mixing paint colors, collage, texture, using your imagination, and a fun book connection - Jeepers Creepers: A Monstrous ABC. After reading the book together, we brainstormed ideas for imaginary creatures and talked about how they might look on school picture day, since we just had ours and everyone was all dressed up.

Pumpkin paintings in 5th grade

We are getting excited in our community about an upcoming art show at the High Museum in Atlanta - the Infinity Rooms show by Yayoi Kusama! My fifth graders and learning about her style, like her love of dots, her clothes that match her works, and her love of pumpkins.

We made our pumpkin paintings by first observing some natural pumpkin forms and drawing the contours. Next, we selected a color scheme of analogous or complementary colors and set to painting. Last, we cut out our pumpkins and made a background. 

4th grade complementary paintings

Fourth graders have been exploring color schemes the last few weeks and our end result is a beautiful nonobjective style painting! Artists work in three basic styles: realistic (looks like real life), abstract (based on real life objects but changed artistically), and nonobjective, which uses elements of art like shape and color as the subject itself, rather than an object from real life like a house or a person. We often call this type of art "a design."

We started by selecting a pair of opposite colors from the color wheel, called complementary colors. We painted a paper with the hi and lo intensities of the pair in 4 sections - to lower the intensity, or brightness, of the color, just mix in a tiny bit of its complement! We often need lower intensity colors when we are painting from nature.

The next week, we used the same colors and created tints and shades using black and white. We used these new values to paint a variety of lines and patterns over our backgrounds. It was great practice using our brushes for thick and thin expressive line.

When the paintings were complete, we paired up with a partner and reflected on our learning using a 321-Art! sheet.