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.

4th grade slab mugs

 4th grade artists learned how to create roll out a slab of clay to 1/4". We then cut our slab into a large rectangle and then cut out a circle and a rectangle. The circle serves as the base and the rectangle was carefully curved around the base to form the wall of our mug. We used a variety of found objects--like forks, spoons and spools to add designs, pattern and texture to our mugs.
After these were fired in our kiln.  We all made a color wheel and learned about color harmonies. These are specific colors that can be used together for various effects. Our color harmony options were primary, secondary, warm and cool. We chose one color harmony and used those color glazes to glaze our mugs.
These came out great and will be featured at the upcoming specials night on January 14th.

Kindergarten Castles

Kindergarteners learned about castles in art by reading several books-some fiction and some non-fiction. We also "toured" Germany's Neuschwanstein caste in a youtube video. We learned that castles were built for protection. Our castles have a moat, a drawbridge, a watchtower and a keep. After drawing we added color and texture with oil pastels and paint dabbers.

First Grade Snowmen

First graders learned the difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional artwork. We learned that two-dimensional artwork, even though it is flat can look three-dimensional. Enter Snowmen at Night, and Snowmen all Year.  We read both of these books in class digitally using a free website called www.wegivebooks.org. We looked carefully at the illustrations and noted how it looked like moonlight had landed on the snowmen. We also noted that the snowmen looked round because of this moonlight and because of the darker shadow. We drew our snowpeople in pencil, outlined in sharpie, colored in color pencil and used plain old white chalk board chalk for the snow.