Wednesday, February 10, 2016

the abstract front and back.

This week the 3rd graders are continuing to work with foreground and background as they do a project inspired by a  quilt by Elizabeth Balderrama's titled "Gradient". They have now done several projects dealing with 3d space. They have created space with cut paper layers, they've overlapped, changed size, used placement, and used color values. They have made a couple images that are figurative in style and now this one works within the abstract realm.

Before looking at Elizabeth's quilt, we review how 3d space was made in their cloudscapes last week. We also talk about how they can make tints and shades of color.

Elizabeth's quilt has been received with a lot of enthusiasm. The kids really dig the optical illusion quality of it. They pick up on how the values flip in the foreground and background elements.


For this project, students build background gradients with chalk pastels going from dark to light. I make sure to model keeping their drawing hand off the paper to keep things from getting out of control and super messy. For the foreground, they use oil pastels and go from light to dark.




The foreground design is up to them, as long as they have the transition from white, to tint, to color, to shade/black. It's been interesting to see what kinds of shapes kids come up with for their foreground elements.










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