2nd grade legos

OPEF (Oak Park Education Foundation), the 2nd grade team, and two art teachers all joined forces as second graders completed a community building project. Students walked around Oak Park and looked at the amazing architecture. In the Art room, students were given a blue print of a building in Oak Park. After learning about scale and how tall their lego scaled model of their building needed to be, students began work. They had 3 references photos of the building and made their models 1/60 the size of the original buildings.
You can see the work on this video:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk5Rz-5d-OQ&list=UUAV2EQtmUowV7-Pz2BIig5w&index=1

5th Grade Surreal Collage

5th graders studeied surrealism. We learned the surrealism combines real, common, everyday things in very unusual ways. We looked surreal artists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo was a Renaissance artist who became famous for painting portraits of people but using fruit, or vegetables for all of their facial features. We traced our silhouettes onto cardstock, cut them out and then used a collage technique to complete our self-portraits.  Upon completion, students used these art projects in Spanish class to write artist statments in Spanish, discussing their choice of imagery. 

3rd grade Robot Paintings

Third graders read the book "Robot Zot" by Jon Scieszka. We looked carefully at the pictures and talked about Robot Zot. What makes him look like a robot? The answer was details--little bolts, antennae, switches and texture. He looked metallic. We noticed a white shiny highlight and some shading. We also talked about why people build robots, mostly to do jobs humans don't want to do. After drawing our own unique robot. We painted them one solid color. We then discussed adding a light source in our art, so it looks like there is light shining on our robot. On the same side as the light, we painted our white highlight. On the side opposite the light source, we painted a shadow by mixing our robot paint color with a bit of black paint. We will add backgrounds next week. I found the idea for this project here: http://www.johnpost.us/Teaching%20Links/Painting%20Lessons/robot-paintings/robot-paintings.html

Kindergarten Paper Sculptures

Kindergarten artists learned about sculpture! We compared a drawing and a sculpture. "What's the difference between these two artworks?" We noticed that the painting is flat and the sculpture is not. We can turn the sculpture around and look at it from many different angles. The painting, however, is not meant to seen from the back. We then reviewed all the different types of lines--horizontal, vertical, diagonal, wavy, zig-zag and spiral. We then created sculptures of all those lines using primary-colored construction paper.

4th and 5th grade Specials Night

 Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in Specials Night. We had a great turn out! Each 4th and 5th grader had two pieces of artwork on display. 4th graders created clay slab mugs, and landscape paintings. 5th graders studied glass blowing and Dale Chihiluy and created 'glass' bowls. 5th graders also studied surrealism and had a collage project that Spanish class helped with.

Winter Lanscapes

Kindergarten and First grade artists looked at a variety of painted landscapes. We talked about how a landscape painting is a picture of outside. It might have buildings in it, or it might just have nature. We also discussed foreground and background. Our background uses warm colors and features a sunset and was painted with tempera cakes. Our foreground is painted using scrap pieces of mat board dipped in black paint and printed in the shape of winter trees. Lastly, since it 'tis the season, we sponge painted white snow on the bottom of our paper and used old marker caps to print falling white snow.

Happy Holidays!

 This is the week before winter break. As such, some classes are finishing up various projects and some classes are caught up and have an 'extra' class. The classes that are ahead reviewed the Elements of Art--specifically value and form. We then drew snow men from an artist-led video on youtube. We finished these with watercolor paints and added a shadow to make our snowman appear to have form (be 3-D).  We folded our papers in half before starting so these are actually cards. Some students chose to add text like "Happy Birthday," "Happy Holidays", or "Merry Christmas". These examples all come from 5P.