Flattery from Pinterest

  It's taking me a while to completely hop onto the Pinterest train, but after looking closer at my blog traffic sources, I realized that Field Elementary artists are already represented on Pinterest! (If you are slow to get on the train too, Pinterest is an online pin board where you can keep track of images that you like.).  I was surprised and flattered to see that people have pinned images from this blog!  Check it out here!

Wild Things from Suffield, 2011-2012!

    It's wild thing time again!  I love coming up with new artworks to try with my students, but some I love so much that I do them every year!  I love to see the creative wild things the first graders come up with after reading one of my favorite books ever.  Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak is a story about a little boy who uses his imagination to cope with the consequence he receives for being disrespectful to his mom.  This is one of my ultimate hopes for all of my students: to get creative and to use your imagination in response to difficult situations. 

    The artwork is really simple.  The students look at pictures of Sendak's Wild Things, and then draw their own, using his illustrations as inspiration.  I tell the students to first draw eyes somewhere near the tops of their papers, then draw a nose and mouth below them, add ears, and then draw the face shape around those features.  This seems to give everyone a good place to start.  The students add at least two patterns to their drawings, then we trace them with permanent markers and color with crayons.  We create the landscape habitats on separate paper with oil pastels and watercolors, cut the wild things out, and then glue them into their habitats.

Suffield Kindergarten Self-Portraits 2011-2012!

     Although I have now moved the art train over to Brimfield, I have some Suffield artwork that we finished up at the end of my 6 weeks there that I will be posting!

    I always start my kindergarten artists out with this self-portrait artwork.  It serves as a great introduction to art class because it has lots of steps that help me teach common artmaking procedures that we use over and over again.  The kindergartners learn to slow down and really focus on their drawing (we make these drawings one step at a time!), they learn how we paint in the art room (dip your brush in the water and then pull it up the side of the water bucket to get rid of excess water and don't tap!), and they learn to cut out their drawings with "white frosting" or "snow" around their black outlines so that none of their precious drawing gets snipped.  We also learn how to trace our drawings with Sharpies so they show up better and to flip our papers upside-down to better reach the top.

    We start the drawings by tracing t-shirt stencils that I made from tag board.  I always encourage students to start full-body drawings with the shirt first and then to just add the other body parts to it.  I think the t-shirt stencil really forces the kindergartners to draw big and gives everyone a strong starting point.  I will post a photo of one of the stencils when I post the portraits from Brimfield that we just started this week!



Foreshortening Self-Portraits with Alan Bean

 

    Thank you to Mrs. Susa from Lake Elementary who shared this out of this world fifth grade lesson with me a few years ago!  To start, we looked at some of the super-realistic paintings of astronaut-turned-artist Alan Bean.  We also talked about the concept of foreshortening (extreme perspective where objects on a 2-dimensional surface seem to reach out to you).  The students then traced their hands and feet and an upside-down water bucket for a helmet.  I challenged the kids to draw themselves as astronauts, but it was up to them to decide to make a realistic outer-space artwork or a more imaginative one.  The artists also worked really hard to draw believable faces with correct proportioning.

     We blended crayons and/or colored pencils for the drawn objects and painted various mixes of shaded glittery paints for the outer-space backgrounds.  Some students also painted over their dry media with watercolors to create richer colors.