40 minutes? bring it!

For the rest of this week, including today, our school is on minimum day schedule due to parent conferences. I modified my schedule for the week, so that I could still meet with all the classes each day and the classroom teachers all get a breather. This leaves me with 40 minutes instead of the normal hour to do a lesson with the kiddos.

I still wanted to do a project focusing on warm and cool colors using an image by Geninne Zlatkis for inspiration, but I knew the bear and bird project could not be completed in that time frame.

I selected another, well, part of another image she made, for the students to model their drawings on. We still focused on the same elements- warm and cool colors, creating volume with color value, and pattern/texture making.

Blue Opuntia

She included a close up of the image on her blog and I decided that section would be more manageable for the students to do.

Instead of breaking out the white paint at the end to add texture and pattern, students used a superfine sharpie marker to add cactus spikes and feather patterns to their drawings.

The students are really starting to get the hang of making things look 3d by pressing hard and soft to make different values. This will be their last colored pencil project of the year and I am pleased with how much their skill levels have improved. great job 2nd grade!

Even though the drawing was pretty direct, students had independent color decisions to make. Of course numerous students added personal touches to their drawings to make them more unique as well.

The students really enjoyed looking at Geninne's work and they also liked seeing different things in the shapes of their cacti as we drew them. kind of looking at clouds and seeing different creatures and objects:)

winter, meet spring.

This week I wanted to do a follow up warm and cool color lesson with the 2nd graders. I was checking out Geninne's art blog and came across an image that I thought would be a perfect fit.

Geninne makes many paintings and other craft works that feature birds. She has a wonderful sense of color and decorative and spatial line. In this image I saw springtime meeting up with the winter season personified in the two chosen animals.

I decided that the kids would render the bird only in warm colors to contrast against the cool colors used on the polar bear and the background. 

Before starting the hands on lesson we watched a few minutes of Geninne working on one of her paintings. She posts short videos of her work in progress on her blog, so viewers can get a glimpse into her creative process. Well, the kids LOVED that. They oohed and ahhed at every stroke of color she applied.

We drew out our compositions together. We then added value with the cool colors to the polar bear. I emphasized changing the amount of pressure to create light and dark color values. Students added warm colors of their choice to their birds.

The final step was to add white paint to the various parts to add texture, pattern, and detail. 

The kids did a great job and they really enjoyed seeing their winter/spring friends come to life with color.

Thanks for the continued inspiration Geninne!

look out for those cacti!

The 1st graders' first project focused on geometric shapes, contour lines, and texture. I wanted to revisit a couple of those elements while looking at different types of shapes.

Enter Geninne Zlatkis. She is a painter and illustrator, living in Mexico, that keeps an amazing blog about her work, her process, and her inspirations. One of the things I really appreciate about her blog is her images and videos of works in progress. She allows readers to see behind the curtain so to speak.

Her paintings of the natural world have a fresh and vibrant sense of color that is complimented by the delicacy of her line work and rendering of texture and pattern.

The students viewed her blog with me and we talked about some of her subjects- plants and animals. These subjects are examples of natural shapes in art and, well, nature. We talked about how Geninne uses line in different ways to may cacti look spiky, birds look feathery, and fish look scaly.

The final thing we talked about before starting their drawing was color. In the previous drawing they did,  students could use any color they wanted. This time, they could only use the primary colors, plus pink because it is a tint of red. We reviewed the secondary colors that are made by mixing the primaries and when I showed them an example of what they would be doing I discussed how I made those new colors by blending different primaries together.

1. draw cacti and birds with pencil
2. trace contour lines with black marker
3. color shapes with primary color crayons, mixing them together in different combinations to make secondary colors in areas. press hard and soft to create dark and light versions of those colors.