porkchop pop?

This week the 1st graders and I checked out the work of Leonard "Porkchop" Zimmerman. He is a painter living in Georgia who paints a lot of robots. These paintings are often fully saturated with color and emotion. There is a lovely energy and narrative to many of his works.

We looked a few of the images rotating through on his website and then focused on a couple images that were clear examples of Porkchop's use of line, shape, and color value to make his creatures look real and 3 dimensional.

The image that we re-interpreted was a monkeybot painting that Porkchop did for a local children's hospital. We talked about how the bot was made up of a bunch of cylinders- long, short, thick, and thin. We also talked about how he used light and dark to make some of his shapes look more round.

When we did the drawing together it was pretty direct. Students followed along as I built mine up front. Students had choices to make in terms of details, and color. We drew the monkey on a smaller piece of brown paper, traced and colored it, and cut it out. Once that was glued onto a white sheet we added the rest of the monkey and color.

Even though the students had the same steps to follow, many of the monkeys have distinct, wonderful personalities.

Thanks for the inspiration Porkchop!