Contour Lines drawing, painting landscapes, perspective names

First and Second grade are finishing up their unit on Landscape drawing and painting, they are creating an interesting landscape making sure to show the foreground, middle ground, and background, they made things using outlines and added paint this week.

Fourth grade learned about 1 point perspective and the vanishing point.  Students created their names using block lettering and those letters always go back towards the vanishing point. This project is especially tricky, because students must figure out how each line will look as it goes back towards the vanishing point.

Third Grade is learning about Contour lines.  Contour comes from the French word for Outline.  Students practiced contour line drawing, continuous contour line drawing (Pencil never leaves the paper) and blind contour line drawing (Where students do NOT look at the paper and only look at the subject)

Here students are practicing their contour lines while drawing the contours of their hands

and here are a few examples of the blind contour line drawing, you can see the outlines of these student's faces, even though everything isn't exactly in the right place. (Pretty tough when not looking at the paper!)

Andy Goldsworthy

Well, it's October so that means it's time for a new artist of the month: Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy is a Naturalist Artist, that means he uses only things found in nature as his tools and art.  He collects leaves, rocks, snow, and ice, and uses those items to make an interesting composition.  Goldsworthy loves to "capture the moment" by taking a picture of the work at its peak, or when the art is done, he then likes to watch wind take away the leaves, sun melt the snow, and allow time to age his gigantic wooden sculptures.

Fifth Grade is starting a new project: Designing a Minnesota state flag for Youth Art Month.

Youth Art Month (YAM) takes place during the entire month of March.  YAM is a celebration of our student artists! Each year, Students take part in a Youth Art Month flag design competition.  Students design a flag for their state containing symbols for art in Minnesota.  Each school has 2 winners, and from those winners, 1 student from Elementary, Middle, and High school, state wide, is selected as the Student flag design winner.  These winners get their flags made into an actual 3'x5' flag and that flag gets to be on display during the Youth Art Month art show at the Minnesota State Capitol from March 24th - March 30th, 2013.... here are a few examples of past entries.

Foreground, middle ground, background...Finishing Kandinsky and Portraits

Third grade will be finishing up their Kandinsky style artwork unit this week by painting with watercolors.  Students made circles using crayons on their paper, these crayons create a resist, so colors don't mix into each other and turn everything brown.  After drawing the circles, they painted each box a variety of colors. 

1st and 2nd grade learned how to show things in the foreground, middle ground, and background.  Everything in the background is really far away so it will look small, everything in the middle ground is normal sized and everything in the foreground is HUGE.  They also learned what the Horizon line is and where to place it on their background.

Below are a few examples from each grade.

Fifth Grade finished their self portraits; in the background they drew things about them that they liked or pictures that would help someone who doesn't know them, to know a little bit about the artist.