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.

Kindergarten Pumpkins

Kindergarten artists spent two classes working on these pumpkin collages. The first class we learned about mixing colors. We used red and yellow liquid water color paint. We painted  our entire 9x12 paper orange by mixing red and yellow together. After letting these dry, we discussed how shapes are used in art to draw things. We used triangles, ovals, squares and circles in our collages. We used lots of different colored construction paper, cutting them into different shapes to create our expressive pumpkin portraits.

The Longest Line 5th grade

5th grade artists looked at the artwork of Keith Haring. We looked at how he uses lines in his art. For our project these were the rules:
1) Line starts at stops at the same spot (a dot in the corner of paper)
2) Line must stay within half of an inch of itself
3) Line must never cross itself (that'd be a shape)
4) Line can change as often as you like from wavy to zig-zag to castle, etc.

We then traced our hands over our drawings. The lines inside our hands now all turned to shapes. Using thin drawing markers, we colored the shapes.

Kindergarten Self Portraits

Kindergarteners learned what a portrait is in Art. A portrait is a picture of a person. A self-portrait is a picture of you. We looked at American Gothic by American artist Grant Wood. We discussed what we saw-two grumpy, old, wrinkly people, a pitch fork, a house, and a barn. What do these details tell us about these people? We figured out that they must be farmers and that life on their farm must be hard. We then began our self portraits. Our goal was to draw ourselves using mirrors to help us see our hair style and color, eye color, clothes, etc. In our self-portrait we had to include details that told other people about our lives. We also had to include a background. We traced a circle for our head and a triangle for our bodies. Students used the triangle in different ways. Some girls used it to create a dress or skirt, while some boys flipped it over and added pants or shorts. If you ask your kindergarten artist, they should be able to explain how their self-portrait reveals details about their lives.