Warm & Cool Leaves

These are always a fun and easy fall project. 

Kindergarten and 1st grade students use oil pastels and tempera cakes to create textured paper using warm and cool colors. After the paint dried, we learned how to cut leaf shapes from the warm paper and collaged them onto the cool backgrounds. The final step was to use neutral colors to add details like veins on the leaves and motion marks in the background. Always love seeing these! 

 

Surprised! Tigers in the Jungle

5th grade viewed the works of Henri Rousseau, especially Surprised! 

We used a wet-on-wet watercolor technique to create a stormy sky. I love the lightning effect these got where the watercolors ran on the page!

After our papers dried, we followed a video from Art for Kids Hub to draw our tiger. Then we cut and collaged with scraps of green papers to create the jungle. 

The Very Busy Spider

Because you HAVE to wear a spider dress with this lesson. ^_^

This lesson is a new addition to the kindergarten curriculum this year as a study of secondary colors. I adapted this lesson after seeing it on Artolazzi's blog. We started by mixing secondary colors from primary colors and used texture combs to make the papers more interesting. I cut their papers into different shapes before we painted so that they could be used for the spider's body, head, and legs. 

The following week, we worked together to cut the oval body, circle head, and stick legs for our spider. We used horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines to create a spider web drawing for our spider's home. Adorable, will definitely do again! 

How to Draw a Mouse...with letters

Someone AGES ago asked me to share how we draw our mice for our Mouse Paint lesson in kindergarten. I have uploaded the directions to my TPT for FREE! Go get it if you want it! Make some adorable mice! Learn about primary colors! Follow the link here. 

Monsters!

Everyone loved this lesson from Art Projects for Kids, simple monsters! This was a good refresher of warm and cool colors. We used neon oil pastels and watercolors. 

Faith Ringgold Mural

1st grade viewed the quilt artworks of Faith Ringgold. We reviewed symmetry and introduced radial symmetry. Then we worked together to create radial designs that would become quilt squares. 

I used their squares as the edge of a giant quilt mural, basically a giant version of 2nd grade's Ringgold cityscape collages. 

The quote is the last line of Ringgold's stroy, "Tar Beach". This mural took me the longest to make so far this year, but definitely worth it! ^_^

Tar Beach Collage

2nd grade viewed Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold. We drew and painted a cityscape inspired by the city skylines in her work. Then we attached the painting to a larger paper. After that, we added squares of fabric and patterned papers. They are awesome!

Andy Warhol's Cats

3rd grade loved learning about Andy's cats and exploring his early illustrations. This was a simple lesson. I found a few "How to Draw Cats" pages online. You can find links to the How-To's under each cat image. 

Original by Andy Warhol

We drew all 3 together, then they picked their favorite to finish. We traced with sharpie and added watercolor paints. 

Very easy, super cute, and a great opportunity to wear my many-colored cats dress! 

The names you see are what they named their cats, like Andy signed "Sam's" name to his cat drawings. 

How to draw this sitting cat from Art Projects for Kids. 

How to draw this laying down cat from ArtsyCraftyMom.

Chihuly Cylinder

This simple project for 1st grade was a great review of warm and cool colors while introducing the works of glass artist Dale Chihuly. We viewed his cylinder glassworks and compared them to his paintings of cylinders. We watched videos of Chihuly painting and noticed how much movement he used and how fast he worked. Then we made our own cylinders using oil pastels working quickly. We painted our backgrounds using watercolors. 

String Pull Art

Ok, new favorite project, seriously. This took me a while to perfect, knowing how much paint, pressure, etc. to use. But once I understood enough to teach it, the kids really mastered the technique and created gorgeous artworks! This is 2nd grade!

We were inspired by the glass artworks of Dale Chihuly. We viewed his works and noted his used of organic lines and transparent colors. Then we mimicked it using the string pull technique. Can you see the resemblance?

Chihuly Paintings

3rd grade nailed it again with these gorgeous paintings based on the work of Dale Chihuly. We viewed his glassworks and discussed how he relays his ideas to his team using drawings and paintings. Then we created these amazing artworks with many layers!

The first step was to create a background. We are working on tagboard because we needed to add a lot of paint to these. They used large dry brushes, texture rollers, and paint scrapers to create a textured background. 

After the paint dried, we viewed videos of Chihuly painting and talked about how he used movement in his artworks. Then we played a matching game, matching some of his paintings to the sculptures.  I really wanted them to understand how the 2D and 3D artworks were related, and this help a lot!

You can find a link to the images I printed for the game here.

After playing the game and talking about the shapes he would use in his paintings, we used oil pastels to add quickly-drawn shapes inspired by Chihuly's glassworks.

To finish them off, we use liquid paint in squeezy bottles (official name) to add a few more details. I tried to stress that "less is more" in this case and that we just needed to add a little more interest to our paintings.

These are always a hit and they were so proud of their work!