bundling up in socal.

brrr...

Not really, but we can pretend, can't we?

Last week the kinders got into the season by creating mixed media collages based on the illustrations of Ekaterina Trukhan. They made 3d collages the week before and I wanted them to have a bit more practice with cutting, gluing, and pattern making.

Ekaterina uses simple shapes to create some adorable little characters in her illustrations. She recently had her first children's book published. I think the kids really enjoyed her work because kids are a big part of what she does.

We based our project on one of her illustrations and the kids identified the ovals, circles, and patterns that Ekaterina used. I gave kids 3 color choices for the hat and 3 for the skin tone. They cut out an oval for the hat and a circle for the face.

After they were glued in place the students added a simple face. I asked them to show how the kid was feeling in the picture through the type of line they used for the mouth. They then added patterns to the hat to make it more interesting.

The final steps were to add a jacket, patterned or not, and a simple background if the wanted to add one.

The kinders have a come a long way with their cutting skills this year. Most are holding the scissors correctly and a lot of them are getting the hang of turning the paper instead of the scissors as they cut.

The finished portraits certainly have a lot of character:)

some shiny flowers.

A few weeks ago, I worked with the 1st graders on a clay project that was inspired by the fabulously textured and glazed ceramic pieces by Charity Hofert.

The first three 1st grade classes got to glaze their clay flowers last week. I had to wait the whole weekend to see what they turned out like:(

Today I cracked open the kiln and got to see these.

Upon closer inspection, they looked like this.

Some of the texture patterns showed up better than others, but in each piece you can see that the kids worked the surface of each piece they shaped. 

Five more classes need to glaze their flowers. I decided to have each class work with an analogous color scheme, or as I tell them, a color family. The kids selected one clay layer for each of the 3 colors in the family they were working with. The final step, was to lightly sponge a fourth color onto one of their layers to give the piece just a little more visual variety.

Once all the classes are done glazing, I would love to install them temporarily as a group installation somewhere. I plan on contacting some local businesses to see if they would help us put on a show near our school.

I think a flower field that had a natural flow to it would look pretty cool.

I played on the floor for a few minutes today:) 

Once again, our first graders have impressed me. Thanks for the inspiration, Charity.

I'll post more pics when all the classes are done.

rock the vote:)

What?

You thought the election season was over?

Not so fast...

It's time to nominate your favorite art education blog or blogs for the Art Ed Blog of the Year award.

The Art of Education blog, which is an amazing resource, is sponsoring this wonderful way to recognize the art educators out there who are using the blogosphere to reflect on their practice and celebrate student creativity and achievement.

Voting is open through this Friday, December 7th.

Vote for your faves by commenting on this link. Click on the word link and it will take you where you need to go:)


Make sure to supply a link to the blog and tell them what makes the blog stand out to you.

Easy peasy. No yard signs or robo calls to annoy you. Us art teachers are good like that:)

a few more flakes. (the snow kind)

My last class of 5th graders for the week finished up by giant bag of packing pnuts today.

These are some of the more interesting creations:)

 I like how tall this kid got. This is the same guy that on his octopus sketches, labeled his favorite with a "ftw". (for the win:)

 What was the inspiration for this one???

 Why, a hotdog, ketchup, and mustard bottles. Love it.

 This guy went all out. Going from snowflake to complete igloo.

He still started with the basic snowflake shape:)

styro snow.

Bit of a different week around here. Parent conferences are going on, so we are not meeting with classes like we normally do. I have 3 fifth grade classes this week for a shorter than usual time. I decided to do a low impact, read low mess, sculpture project.

I have used starch packing pnuts for projects before. Usually they are colored and go by the brand name Stik-its. For this project we used plain ol' packing pnuts.

At the beginning of the lesson we talked about symmetry in art and how it could occur in different directions in a shape or form. I drew a simple snowflake (vertical, horizontal, 2 diagonals) to model this on the whiteboard. I then told the classes that was what we would make today.

Huh? A snowflake? Cool. Um, okay... Were some of the student responses to this. I showed them how the pieces would stick together with a little water.

We all started out making the basic snowflake shape. After that I stressed that it was up to them to make their snowflake unique like snowflakes are. The could build up, out, across... I reminded them to focus on creating symmetry in whatever they made.

The students did a great job with the project. There was certainly a lot of variety in shape and form.

The fifth grade groups are the most social of my grades, and they did a fantastic job keeping things "chill" in the room as they built their pieces. I plan on selecting a number of them to display in the school office for the month of December.

Beauty, Clark:)

surf's up!

This is the lesson I did with the 3rd grade classes before the light motion project.

Heather Brown is a painter and printmaker who lives on the North Shore of Oahu. She loves being in, on, and around the water. These are the things she makes her art about. Her work reminds me of stained glass windows, with her use of bold, bright colors and thick contour lines. 

I shared a few of her paintings with the students. We revisited 3d space in art and how Heather creates in with size, overlapping, and color value changes. We then talked about how she creates movement in her work. All the kids agreed that the waves looked like they were moving and not standing still. I got a   lot of wave hand gestures and air spirals when kids were describing why Heather's waves looked like they were moving. That was great because she does create movement by simply using curved and wavy lines. She also does it by the position of the waves. They won't be staying in that position for more than a split second. 

We also looked at Heather's color usage. She uses lighter colors and darker colors to give the waves some volume, as well as to give her scenes some 3d depth. The 3rd graders had created light and dark versions of colors in their first two projects, but they did it through changing hand pressure. Students in each class were able to tell me that in order to do it with tempera paint, they would have to use more or less water.

We drew out our waves together. I did several different seascapes with the classes. Most were based directly on Heather's paintings and a couple were different compositionally, but used her vocabulary of shape, line, and color.

We traced most of the lines with a black crayon to help keep paint from bleeding from shape to shape. We used sharpie markers to trace the lines in the white foam parts because they were often smaller and more detailed than the other parts.

When it was time to paint the waves, I suggested using the analogous color family of yellow, green, and blue, with some violet thrown in too. They could use other colors on their surfers, skies, and islands. The main thing, no matter what color they used, was to mix light and dark values of those colors to create 3d volume and space in their paintings.

A few students finished their work by the end of our first meeting, many kids came in during recesses to get further along, and pretty much all the students were done painting after having 20 more minutes during our 2nd meeting.

I think so many of the results came out terrific. Stunning really.The students really enjoyed the project and Heather's work. It's something about the ocean and waves as the subject, I think. This is the 3rd project over the past couple years that I have done with waves and the students always have a high level of engagement.