Winter break

4th and 5th grade students discussed perspective. We learned that most drawings we make our drawn from our eye level or perspective. Drawing something from a different perspective can make an image more interesting to look at. We looked at artwork that was drawn or photographed from both a bird's eye perspective and a worm's eye perspective. We then drew our snowmen and snow women as a worm might see them...

4th grade self portraits

2nd grade textured slab bowls

Kinder clay fossils

Kindergarten artists learned about fossils. We read several books and talked about how we can learn from fossils. They have plants and animals in them that may not exist anymore. We also learned about how people have been using clay to create functional artwork for thousands of years. To create our clay "fossils", we used rolling pins to roll out clay slabs. Then  we used real leaves to add to texture and print the leaves into the clay. We also added texture by printing with toy dinosaurs to create footprints and skeleton shapes into our clay. After the clay was dried and fired, we painted them brown and then used old sponges and water to scrub off most of the paint, but leaving painting in the deep textured areas, so that our fossils were emphasized.

Surreal self portraits

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian renaissance painter known for his surreal portraits of nobility. His portraits are constructed entirely out of common objects--fruits, vegetables, animals or books. 5th graders studied his artwork along with the work of surrealist painters Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. We traced our silhouetted profiles onto poster board and cut them out. Using a collage technique, we collected images from magazines and encyclopedias to create proportional but totally surreal self portraits.