The Art Room: November 2013

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

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.

Monday, November 18, 2013

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.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Day of the Dead

Students in various classes created these Dia de Los Muertos sugar skulls. We read a book on Day of the Dead and watched a great short video. As a class we drew the skulls and independently students added their symmetrical designs. We added color and practiced shading using metallic colored pencils. Some students had time to add a pattern onto their black paper frame as well. These examples are from fourth grade.

4th grade op art

4th grade artists looked closely at the artwork of Brigit Riley and Victor Vasarely. They are credited with founding "optical art" or op art. It is artwork that attempts to play on the weaknesses of the human eye. This type of art features 3-d looking imagery, often abstract, on a 2-d surface. We also studied the colorwheel and used complementary colors for added pop and contrast in our images.

10 things learned in Art

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

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