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!

Lego Sculptinary

When most of the class is finished with their artwork and there are 5-10 students still finishing work, I like to play my twist on Pictionary. Groups of students use legos to create the word selected.  Each team has 3 minutes to create and present their artwork, one team is selected at random to be the judges for the project.  (they complete the sculpture too and are notified after the time is up.) 

Building as a team

Putting parts together (Roller Coaster)

Shark Attack

Rocky Mountains

What the Art Teacher Wore

Everyone remembers their Elementary Art teacher, most of them wore the same shirt/dress smock combo every day...now with paint on every pair of pants I own, I understand why. Well cue Cassie Stephens ( Blog ) She creates famous artworks on many of her outfits and is currently running a best dressed contest, you might want to head on over and vote for Michael VanGogh aka Me!

VOTE HERE

Check it out and vote away! (Mobile version, scroll to the bottom and click view desktop version)

Pop Art Portraits

4th Grade is finishing up their unit in Pop Art, they took a look at the work of Roy Lichtenstein and his use of color as well as the Benday dot style he used.

Students first drew the outline of their face, they used a caricature style to keep the facial features simple.

After drawing the portrait, students outlined their face with a thin sharpie.

After outlining the face, students drew diagonal lines across the face lightly, these lines will serve as the lines in which to put the benday dots.

Students put dots on the lines in a brown, red, yellow, peach, or orange color. Most students chose a color similar to their skin color.

After finishing with the dots, students erase the pencil lines underneath, and create a different dot pattern for hair, shirt and background.

Students color with colored pencil under the dots and create an interesting background.

After finishing with the portrait and the background, students create a caption and cut it out, adding it to their portrait.

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