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.