4th Grade Shoes

4th grade artists looked at the shoes in prints and paintings created by Andy Warhol and at the many boots Vincent VanGogh painted. We talked about how artists draw still lives to get better at seeing and then in turn, get better at drawing. We actually took off one shoe, placed it in front us and drew from observation. Some students drew the bottom of their shoe as well. Our backgrounds were kept simple but interesting by adding leading lines that pointed at our shoes. We outlined in sharpie and used colored pencils to create value by shading from light to dark to make our shoes look 3-D.

Happy Holidays!

Holmes artists learned about two-dimensional (2-D)and three-dimensional (3-D) objects. We discussed that 2-D shapes (like a circle) are flat because they have only two dimensions: height and width. 3-D forms (like a sphere) however, have three dimensions: height, width and depth which makes them appear to pop out at us. We drew snowmen and snowwomen using shapes but then discussed how to use a light source in our drawings to create highlights, shadows and cast shadows on the spherical forms of our snow people. This was a really fun project enabled grades 1-5 to create 3-D looking snow people. Students customized the snow folks too. They can be found snowboarding, ice skating, skiing and just chillin'.

5th grade Surrealism

5th graders studied the art movement “Surrealism”. We looked at famous Surrealists including Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Arcimboldo Giuseppe. It is Giusuppe’s artwork that we focused on the most. He created strange and magnificent portraits of people using fruits, vegetables, animals and many other things. Even though his artwork was surreal, it also featured accurate human facial proportions. We traced silhouettes or our heads onto cardstock and created these surreal faces using magazines, maps and newspapers in our surreal collages.

Abstract Landscapes

2nd grade artists looked at the artwork of Jackson Pollock. We reviewed how he painted--by splattering, flinging and dripping paint onto his canvas. There are no recognizable objects in his paintings, making them abstract. Then we looked at realistic wintery landscapes created by various artists. We then created a slightly abstract wintery landscape painting using only black and white tempera paint. Our abstract trees were created by blowing the paint around our paper using straws in a Jackson Pollock-esque way of action painting.

Give 3rd grade a hand!

Third grade artists learned about contour lines. A contour line drawing is a drawing based on direct observation. The idea is that your eye looks very closely at what you are drawing. Your eye and your hand become 'synced', and your hand draws exactly what your eye sees. So your eye is crawling very slowly over the contours (edges) of your hand. As your eyes slowly observes these details, your hand draws them. After some practice drawings we looked at the American Sign Language alphabet. We picked one word to spell. Most of us chose our names. We posed our hand in the chosen letter and drew each hand through direct observation. This was not an easy project, but we found that if we let our eyes do the observing, most anything is fairly simple to draw.

KindergARTen Sunflowers

Kindergarten artists learned about the life and artwork of Vincent VanGogh (1853-1890).  We looked Starry Night and the many different versions of his sunflower paintings, but we spent the most time looking at Vase with 12 Sunflowers.  We discussed how some of the flowers looked healthy and alive while others looked wilted and dead.  We noticed the colors that he used in his paintings—warm colors like reds, yellows and oranges. We then donned our smocks and created our own versions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers using only warm colors and tempera paints. We used construction paper to fold and cut out symmetrical vases and used markers to draw line designs on them.

First Grade Action Paintings

First grade artists learned about the abstract artwork of Jackson Pollock. Pollock reached fame and fortune through his "action paintings" where he splatted, dripped, poured and flung his paint unto his canvas. We discussed the color wheel and reviewed the primary colors. We created our action paintings by putting our paintings in a tray, placing blobs of primary paint colors on our papers and rolling marbles around and letting them mix and drag our colors around the paper. We completed a second action painting by blowing paint around on our paper using straws. We concluded by using the netbooks and visiting www.jacksonpollock.org and painting 'Pollock-style' online.

Art Show!

Please visit the Oak Park Public Library to see artwork created by Holmes students. All grades K-5 (excluding 2nd grade) have artwork on display.  All 5th grade classes, 4GE, 3N, 1CO, and KM can all see their artwork in the "Art Alcove, " located downstairs in the Children's section of the library. The work is on display through the month of December.