Specials Night, First Grade

These mixed-media Art projects feature first graders' understanding of the primary colors and how they are used to create the secondary colors. We looked at the paintings of Audrey flack. She was a pioneer in a style of painting known as photorealism. We looked at her painting of crayon a crayons. Why do they look so real? We noticed shadows and highlights and tints (lights) and shades (darks) of the same color. We drew our crayons by drawing cylinders first and then drawing a cone shape on top. We added details like the crayons stripe or the color name. We learned to shade with our crayons, pretending a spot light was shining on them, making one side lighter and one side darker, producing a cast shadow on the table next to each crayon. We then mixed liquid watercolors, in the primary colors, in a resist technique for our backgrounds. En la clase de Espanol, students looked at their artwork and wrote, in Spanish, about how many crayons they drew and how the mixed the primary colors.