Elements: Color, Shape, Texture

'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884'

Pointillism is essentially the creation of an artwork using only dots; the most famous example happens to be my favorite painting. (Above) (More Here)

Third Graders have been working on the elements of art (Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Value, Space, and Form) to start off the year; and pointillism lessons happen to contain the majority of the elements of art.  I love starting the year with this project for establishing painting procedures, expectations, and the full submersion into the elements of art.

Students spent a day practicing tree drawing, learning the simple Y shape goes into each branch, and adding more Y shapes makes the trees more detailed. The following day, students chose warm or cool colors to fill the leaves in the tree, and used qtips to paint the leaves in the trees.

They completed the project by adding a texture to the trees with that same pointillist process.  It was cool to see their frustrations of "Only using dots" turn into amazement with how the final product was beginning to turn out.

 Students added a horizon line and mixed different values of green and yellow for the grass

The finishing touches of this project will include a watercolor wash over the sky and finishing touches of leaves over some of the tree branches.. 

Shooting Stars

Kindergarten students learned to make 4 different types of lines this week, practicing their neat coloring and even painting with watercolor! I was really impressed with their ability to follow directions and paint with watercolor!

Students used crayons and traced their shooting star on watercolor paper, they then followed along with me on the smartboard, practicing straight, bumpy, zig-zag, and loop de loop lines.These lines would create a tail on their shooting star.

 

During our second class, we went over painting procedures and learned how to activate the watercolor. Students painted over their crayon lines and it created a wax resist, not allowing any paint to cover the dark crayon lines.

 

Painting with Crayon

I decided to try something new this year and experimented with crayon painting.  This was a fun and tricky project for our fifth graders.  We collected and sorted old and broken crayons, soaked them in water and removed the paper.  (Soaking removed the paper very easy on most crayons)

Students began by drawing and adding collage elements for the base of the project (For collage we used magazine pieces and colored paper)

Heated up the crayons in tuna cans and warmed it in an old skillet from goodwill

We made sure to do the painting over the kiln where we have the ventilation hood.

The brushes held the wax of the crayon and dried within 10 seconds of dipping it in the wax.  Students became frustrated when trying to paint small areas because built up wax would prevent them from small detailed areas.  We decided to just paint the large areas with wax and smaller areas with water colors and colored pencil.  The results turned out very well!

Picasso's Flowers of Peace

First grade continued their study of Pablo Picasso this week looking at his work "Flowers of Peace"

I started by asking if they thought this was painted by a professional artist or a student and 90% of them guessed it was painted by a student. We discussed the two hands and the title and what the title could mean.  Students discussed and decided the two hands were two people agreeing to peace over flowers.

Students began by tracing their hands near the lower part of the page.

They then drew circles for the flower and ovals for the petals of the flower. Students traced their hands in black crayon and flowers in warm and cool colored crayons.

The next class, Students colored in their flowers with oil pastels, bringing a ton of bright color into their work.

When the flowers are filled with color, we talked about warm and cool colors.  The warm colors represent one person and the cool colors represent the other person.  When the two colors come together to hold the flowers, the colors combine and create this beautiful bouquet of flowers.

Picasso - Flowers Of Peace