Kindergarten Self-portraits

Kindergarten artists learned about portraits and self-portraits. We looked at several portraits--Grant Wood's American Gothic for one. We talked about being art detectives and seeing how many details we could find. We then talked about those details. Why did the artist put them in the painting? Do they tell us something about the people in the portrait? We decided that we could learn alot about the person (or people) in a portrait by looking at their clothes, their facial expression, and the background.
We then created self-portraits and included details about our lives, including a background or the place we are standing in our portrait.

3rd Grade Collages

Third grade artists looked at the artwork of Romare Bearden (1911-1988). Bearden lived in Harlem, New York city and was friends with Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and other well-known artists, writers, and musicians. Bearden's collage artwork often features images from his past where he spent many enjoyable summers on his grandparents farm in Pennsylvania. Bearden used many different collage materials in his works, including cuttings from newspapers, magazines, sample catalogues, painted papers, colored paper, foil, wallpaper, wrapping paper, and art reproductions.
We used magazines, construction paper, and scrapbooking paper to create our city collages. Our cities have a sky with stars or clouds, buildings made of shapes in the middle ground, and a street with cars and people in the foreground.