Texture

Second graders have been learning about texture in art.  Students learned the two kinds of texture; visual texture, and actual texture (tactile texture.) We practiced finding texture around the art room.

 the walls, erasers, shoes

 Step stool

We also read the book "Where the Wild Things Are," and learned about different kinds of visual texture and practiced making textures on a monster creation of our own. Each monster had to have geometric shaped eyes, organic shaped mouth, and an organic shaped body.

 After drawing monsters, textures and details; students outlined with sharpie, then painted with primary colors and even practiced mixing secondary colors with a new medium, watercolor

 Students cut their monsters and prepared to make an abstract background.  To learn about abstract art, we studied the artist Kandinsky and his use of organic and geometric shapes.

 Students cut organic shapes they had previously painted with secondary colors to use as the background for this monster.

 Here are a few of the in-progress examples

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!

Shape People, collage

1st Grade painted with the 3 primary colors (red, yellow, blue) and they made sure to mix those colors, they then reviewed geometric shapes they learned in Kindergarten.  Students traced geometric shapes to make their faces, eyes, nose, mouth, hair; traced them with a sharpie and colored them in.

Fourth Grade started a collage unit, first learning about the collage work of Henri Matisse making sure to have a theme in mind, they cut out backgrounds, people, animals, and words and started putting those together.