Paul Klee Inspired Castles

    I've seen lots of castle-type artworks based on the works of Paul Klee in the art education blog-o-sphere lately and have loved them all!  I used these multiple inspirations to create this lesson for 5th grade at Brimfield earlier this year.  We started by looking at many of Klee's paintings and looked for common themes.  The students found many abstract elements in his works, many architectural elements, and many repeating squares, rectangles, and triangles.  We ended our "gallery walk" of Klee's works with Castle and Sun, and used it as the main inspiration for the artworks the students would create. 

     The students' assignment was to draw a castle, with as many or as little abstract elements as they wanted, and to mostly rely on squares, rectangles, and triangles to do the job!  Many different-looking castles resulted and I was happy to see this!  We then embarked on the use of many different media steps to complete these artworks.

    We traced the lines with regular washable markers.  Then, the students traced the marker lines with glue.  I have had kids trace many different kinds of artworks in glue, but never on top of washable markers.  The result looked like we had used many different kinds of colored glue, and the kids really liked it.  I can't believe I had never tried this before!  When the glue was dry, they colored with watercolor crayons and watercolor pencils.  Then, they painted water over the dry media and THEN painted more regular watercolor paint over any areas that needed a little more "umph"!  Some of the students really ended up with some sophisticated-looking areas of color from the various watercolor media used!

1st Grade Self-Portraits

     I sure love self-portrait projects!  I've done lots at all different levels, and I usually tweak them a bit each time.  For these ones in first grade at Brimfield, we talked about the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci.  We read Who Stole Mona Lisa  by Ruthie Knapp.  The book tells about the painting and da Vinci with a nice story format that the kids liked.  They were absolutely fascinated with the theft and recovery of the famous painting. 

     We drew the faces together with a step-by-step teaching approach.  The kids then used crayons to mix colors for skin tones and hair.  They finished the artworks with watercolors that they also layered and mixed to get just the right colors! 

     One of my favorite moments during this project was when Alhareth came up to me and told me how much he loved his artwork and that he thought it was better than the Mona Lisa.  I told him that I liked his artwork better too and took his photograph.  Here is the proud artist with his masterpiece: 



"I like my artwork better than the Mona Lisa." --Alhareth