Third graders looked at the artwork of Stuart Davis. Davis (December 7, 1892–June 24, 1964), was an early American modernist painter. His paintings feature large, over lapping shapes that create a sense of depth. Using rolls of tape and plastic shapes as stencils, we learned how to correctly overlap things in a drawing to create the illusion of space. We finished these in markers.
4th grade artists studied the artwork of Albert Bierdstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902). He was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. We talked about how to mix tints (lighter versions) and shades (darker versions) of our back ground color. We mixed five different values of one color, from white to really dark. We painted our background first and using only a wet brush, blended the values together to make a seamless gradient. Some students choice to use old toothbrushes to splatter paint stars in their night time skies. The following week we practiced using a fan brush to paint realistic trees, and then finished our paintings.
Kindergarten Artists studied pumpkins. We read a few books about pumpkins. Some books were fiction, one was non-fiction. We created these pumpkin landscapes. We drew pumpkins in the foreground. We drew a horizon line to seperate the sky and the ground. We used oil pastels and blended yellow and red primary colors together to make orange pumpkins. We also blended white and blue together in our skies. The last thing we did was paint over everything, using the resist technique, in watercolor.
