Friday, March 1, 2013

spring forward

It's warming up in San Diego! Woo hoo!

My succulent garden is blooming like crazy, more people are breaking out their shorts, and the 1st graders are drawing springtime landscapes inspired by the work of Tim Nyberg (who is probably still buried in snow. Sorry, sir:)

The first graders have been exploring mixing secondary colors with the primary colors this year. The made orange in their candy corn still lifes and purple backgrounds in their icicle paintings. I thought Tim's work was a perfect introduction to making green. Tim paints and draws portraits, still life, and landscapes. Lots of landscapes. He is crazy productive. Many of his compositions are figurative or figurative abstract. He creates a lot of tree images and I like how these follow the seasons and how he makes sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic modifications to composition as he revisits his subject.

When I shared Tim's work with my classes, I talked about landscape as an art subject, and his heavy use of green. I pointed out that often times their were different greens present in the same work of art.

I based our project on one image in particular, and we drew out the composition together. As we drew I talked about how Tim often made his tree shapes more simple than they really were. We used the letter "U" to make some trees, and many students also used geometric shapes like circles, rectangels, and triangles as well.


We including a little overlapping and size change by putting a simple hill and small tree on it, to make some 3d space in the drawing as well.

Then they were ready to do some mixing. As we colored together I talked about how the greens we make would look different depending on how hard we pressed with the yellow and blue, and what blue we used in the mix.











I love the variety in these. The compositions, of course, are very similar, but the mark making, energy, and color choices make each one unique. The first graders  have done a great job so far this year with learning how to press hard and soft to make different colors or values:)

1 comment:

  1. Way cool! I'm honored to be a part of this. Kudos to the artists! I love kids' art - so fresh... so unencumbered. - Tim Nyberg

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