Picasso's Blue Rose

This was another great lesson from another blogger, Phyl from There's A Dragon in my Art Room. This was such a fun study of Picasso's Blue and Rose periods, while teaching the students about monochromatic color schemes.

My students were a bit thrown with not having skin tones. "How do we make brown?" I reminded them that we were making monochromatic paintings. Some of the students didn't seem to know how to approach painting the face with that restriction.

Our last day, we used various oil pastels in the blue or red range, along with black and white to add details. This really helped a lot of students' work.

I was very happy with the results of these paintings. Thanks again, Phyl for another great lesson!

Embracing Día de los Muertos

As I mentioned before I've had a hard time getting supplies this year, so much of my long term plans disappeared. I had planned on a couple of classes studying Day of the Dead, now nearly all of them all.  There was such excitement in my first class over the celebration, so now I have fully embraced it. This was a great way for many of our students to share what they do for Day of the Dead. Plus, drawing skeletons is FUN! Fortunately, the last art teacher left this skeleton. I dressed him up for drawing a couple of different ways. The last art teacher had named him Bob and said he was her boyfriend, so my 4th grade boys were very concerned about Bob in a dress. Photos of projects will be coming soon!

Sunflowers and Skies!

Not a bunch of new ideas here, but my third graders did such a great job on their sunflower drawings that I had to share. 

We looked at sunflowers (fake ones, though) both individually and in a vase. Then my students just took off with it. I think they mades some interesting choices.

Second grade also studied Van Gogh, but this time Starry Night. We compared Van Gogh's painting to different photos of our city skyline with different skies. The kids were so excited to see photos of their own city, "That's where I live!" They could create any type of sky they wanted. We had storms, sunsets and cloudy skies galore. We had some very colorful ones, and they all turned out fairly successful.

A few of my favorites.

Most of them made no attempt to follow our city skyline at all, which was perfectly fine. I think they turned out great!

Clay cupcakes

I've seen this lesson on probably half a dozen blogs this year.  I loved the idea and decided to do the same lesson this semester with my third graders. We had a few bottoms get a little squished during storage, so some of them don't fit as nicely together. I will definitely do this lesson again, but do a few more teacher checks on them. I don't have glaze at my school this semester, so we painted these with acrylic paint. Some of the paint has a nice sheen, so they were really using that to make them sparkle! The students were so proud of their work, and so was I!

Gyotaku again

Since I'm an art teacher at two schools, one for a semester each, I planned to just repeat the lessons that I did the first semester in the second. I'm always finding such interesting new lessons, so I ended up changing quite a bit anyway. Some lessons I changed just because of time of the year (Van Gogh sunflowers didn't really fit in February.)

 One lesson I did both semesters was fish printing or gyotaku. It was just such a big hit with my students and so very out of the ordinary for their experience that I decided to do the printing again, but I printed with all grades this time.

Last semester, they printed on white paper and just left the clean print. This semester students printed on construction paper (I had plenty of construction paper, but not so much white) and then added a background. I loved some of their creative ideas. I've seen others add the background first, but I liked to have the students totally in the dark about the fact that we were printing with fish.

Again, this was so much fun! It also felt like a bit of a (busy) break from what has been a pretty stressful year.

Steal like an art teacher

I didn't just use Phyl's project for 4th graders, I stole most of her Matisse lessons for the month.

Second graders created Fish-Ish, inspired by both Ish and Matisse. Ish was already one of my favorite books, and one I read to classes at the beginning of the year. I liked the emphasis on it for this lesson, though. Students had a pretty hard time painting the background. I think I will make it simpler if I do this lesson again. However, by the time we added the fish bowl, table and leaves, the project came together fairly well.

I also used Phyl's lesson for "Wild Beasts." Like hers, we talked about how Matisse was a fauve, which means wild beast. We used bright colors and patterns, in the style of Matisse, to paint our animals.