into the deep with yellena.

I've loved the work of Yellena James for many years. 2 of her prints hang in our living room and they are such a treat in terms of shape, pattern, and subtle movement. she was one of the first living artists that I brought into my elementary curriculum and I think it's long overdue to share her work with another generation of Zamorano students.

Recently, Yellena has been working on dark backgrounds and creating shapes and patterns with colors that are most luminescent. I love the glow and the mystery of these darker compositions. To me, they appear to be fantastical studies of underwater sea life.

With my 3rd graders, I'm using her work to start their line unit. We are looking at a number of her paintings and using them as a springboard to experiment with contour line, pattern, and space. When students use sketching to plan their compositions, we talk about how they should be drawing from 3 things- Yellena's work, their personal experiences with nature, and their imagination. After creating at lest 2 sketches, they describe which one they would like to move forward with and then get rolling on the black paper final drawing.

When starting on the black paper, I encourage them to draw out the shapes softly with our crayola colorsticks- this will allow them to erase and edit if necessary. Once things are laid in, they add patterns and other details. Then they can start playing with hand pressure to make some of the elements brighter to pop and to make other parts submerge a bit into the background darkness. I encourage them to elaborate on their sketches- adding more pattern, detail, and color.

There are a few constraints with this drawing activity- a minimum of 3 shapes, 3 patterns, and a use of overlapping. I also encourage them to play with line thickness as well as hand pressure, so that focal points stand out a bit more.

I really am enjoying the variety of compositions that are coming from this drawing experience! next week, they are going to use line a lot differently, so they can see the range of possibilities with the similar elements and materials... stay tuned:)

A few more classes have yet to play, so I'll come back and showcase their work, too.

These are from Thursday:)

Doesn't this necklace totally fit in with the drawings???

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:)