3rd/4th grade Fall Still Life

This week and next week the 3rd and 4th graders, will be drawing form observation. I set up a still life in the middle of the room. We talked about sketching, looking, view finders, observing, and not second guessing yourself. So far it has been a blast. I am so impressed with our drawing skills and imagination.

I encouraged the students to pick at least 2 objects to draw (mostly more than that) and then they could create their own background, such as, a wallpaper designs, outside design, a window, etc. These photos below are works in progress, to be finished next week!

3rd grade Giraffes

Okay.. So I have done this project before, last year. This year I changed it up a little to make it less timely and to give the students more time to paint.

I have seen a lot of "animal portraits" on art education blogs, even some giraffe portraits. I will link up my last year post, because I believe it has some more details.

This year I had the students use oil pastels for the spots and background objects and then used watercolor techniques for the giraffe skin, sky, and grass!

Don't you just love that tongue and character of this giraffe

Oh that nose! such character and creativity

4th grade Keith Haring Positive Negative Designs

We learned about Keith Haring. There is a great Keith Haring website to check out and show your students, www.haringkids.com.

Keith Haring was so original in thought and I wanted to come up with a project that would have the students thinking about different simple people designs as well as, focusing on positive and negative.

So we started with one color sheet 6" x 16" and two 6" x 4". They drw there designs with either pencils or white color pencils to make it clearer.

I showed them how to make "little" cuts an paste it down tightly so it looks like one piece and makes the viewer wonder how they cut it out so neatly and cleanly.

Check them out!

WOW... so impressive!!

1st grade Mondrian Butterflies

This project is actually from last Spring. I don't believe I posted this before.

We studied artist Piet Mondrian. Focusing on lines, shapes, and of course the primary colors.
We started out with 12" x 18" white piece of paper. Holding it horizontally we added a "skinny" oval in the middle of the paper and made wings on each side.
We used rulers to create 4 horizontal lines and 4 vertical lines (diagonals were allowed) We used black oil pastel to draw.

We then added primary colors "randomly" to different shapes. Cut them out and either paste on to another paper (blue) or just keep cut out.

*Modify: You could have the students mix the primary colors into secondary colors, to work on mixing colors and painting neatly. So it would be influenced by Mondrian but have a new twist, with the primary colors.