rearranging the real.

This week, as part of my shape unit, the 3rd graders are looking at the differences between realistic and abstract style. I'm using two sources to assist me with this- the work of Thom Pastrano and the movie The Book of Life.

I start the lesson by using posters hanging in my room to illustrate the differences between the two styles. I talk about how an artist can rearrange reality and play with the shapes, colors, values, and textures of something to make it abstract.

I then share an image of one of the characters from the movie on my smartboard and we talk about how it looks real even though it is really a drawing. I then share a few of the posters Thom has sent me and we look at how he has rearranged and flattened shapes to make well known characters look abstract.

This, I tell the kids, is what we are going to do with the character of the day.

Students start with a collection of geometric shapes. We will alter some of them into more complex geometric shapes and some of them will become more natural looking shapes. I model each piece, emphasizing that if theirs looks different than mine, it's cool because we are making an abstract piece anyway:)

Students create all their shapes first and then play with them and move them around in different ways until they come up with a composition that works for them. Then we glue all those parts in place.

It's been a fun exercise in shape and style for the kids and myself. I'm doing a different character with each class, which will provide a nice amount of variety when they are displayed and it keeps me more engaged throughout the week too! When I see them next week I plan on having them do a compare/contrast activity with this project and the shape project they will complete during that session.

repeating on the street.

I don't do a whole lot of the same projects from one year to the next, but this week I'm going back to the fantastic abstract Sesame Street well of Thom Pastrano's imagination and graphic work. The kinders and I had so much fun with these the first time and the new Muppet Movie just came out, so I thought it would be a fun intro to abstract art.

I did this lesson with 2 kinder classes today and I will do it with a third later this week. (FYI- Hope Knight did a wonderful project with more creative choices for upper grades.) We talked about how artists don't have to make things real all the time. We can mix things up and still make interesting pictures. 

I showed the class a photo of the character and then Thom's version of the charcater and/or my visual sample. Kids identified the parts of the characters that were used in the mixed up versions and then they tried it out for themselves. With each step I showed them how they could make choices so that their design would be a little different than each other's.

I did the below take on Big Bird before, but can you guess who the other character is???

I'm going to do a couple other characters later in the week:)

a visit to the street. part 2.

So, I decided to mix it up with the kinders today. The project was still inspired by Thom Pastrano's series of abstract Sesame Street character posters, but we did images based on a couple different characters than the ones in his series... so far.

Today we looked at Oscar and Big Bird. I showed the kids photos of the puppets and we talked about how an artist doesn't always have to make something look like it really does. We compared Thom's posters to the real deal characters and then we got started making our own.

I'm partial to the Big Bird ones, but Oscar came out cool too. Although I think he reads too much as Frankenstein when the black shape is at the top.

Great job cutting and gluing, kinder kids!

visit to the street.

As in Sesame Street.

Designer Thom Pastrano has done a fantastic series of abstract images based on classic characters from one of, if not, the best children's show of all time. I LOVE these. I thought it would be a kick to recreate a couple of these with my kinders this week. I thought kids would also get a kick out of it.

Funny thing though. When I showed the classes the image below, not many kids knew who the characters were.

I was stunned, and to be honest a little sad that they could not recognize these two cool guys:( More kids knew who Ernie was, but Burt, not so much. We then looked at them and identified shapes and patterns.

After sharing the above photo, I told the class an artist had done pictures of Burt and Ernie, but the pictures looked a lot different. He had moved things around and flattened things out to make something new and interesting.

We took a few minutes to identify where the parts of Thom's images came from on the two puppets. Then we started making one or the other character. The steps were pretty simple. 

The most challenging step for the students was to cut the zigzag line for the spiky hair. I changed the rectangular format of the original images so students wouldn't have as much trouble gluing the skin color piece and shirt pattern on. It also gave kids more options as to where they wanted to place those bigger pieces.

When we did the pattern part we used primary colors for Ernie's shirt and secondary colors for Burt's. I took a little artistic license with Burt's color pattern. It's actually blue, green, and orange, not purple, green, and orange. Shhh....

Great job cutting, gluing, and pattern making kindergarteners!

And of course thank you Mr. Pastrano and Mr. Henson for the inspiration.