A Peak Inside my Portfolio: Landscape Painting

This summer I had a magical painting experience in Florence! It was an awesome time of growth as an artist and also an amazing adventure as a person! I loved every minute of it! When I came home I knew that landscape painting was something I really wanted to keep doing. So whenever I can, I've been travelling to different spots near my house to paint! Thank heavens it's been unseasonably warm, more days to paint! Here's what I've been up to:

This painting was from a site just down the road for our house!

Painting

Real Life

Painting

I'm not as big a fan of this one, it's a park near our house and I think it needs some more contrast.

Painting

This is at the Cranbrook House and Gardens. Beautiful area!

Painting

 This is my favorite one! It's of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club and I think it turned out really well!

Real Life

The Art of Ancient Egypt

What's better than Art of Ancient Egypt? Nothing! Second grade had a whole unit on art from the Middle East and ancient Egypt was by far their favorite. We started off with a presentation about Egypt, including all the awesome, gory details about mummies and tombs and all the good stuff. Then we played an interactive game on the Smartboard that can be found here, where you actually explore a tomb and have to solve problems to get to different parts of your underground exploration. This really set the tone for an awesome lesson because the kids were pumped. We made ancient Egyptian landscapes with repousse metal doors as our Egyptian-inspired art project. I originally got the idea from this site here, but modified it for our class.

Our first day of art making included drawing pyramids and other details onto our landscape and then coloring with colored pencils. We practiced adding all kinds of texture, like bricks and shadows for the sand. They could do a night time or day time scene. It was all great work!

Then we busted out the metal. I used a lightweight piece of sheet metal for each student. I cut them to be the same size as the paper they had just drawn their landscape on. We talked about how to treat the metal and be safe. Then I demonstrated how to use a pointed wooden tool to etch into the metal any designs the students wanted. I had up examples of hieroglyphics (which we had talked about during our first class) that I encouraged the students to use to spell out messages or just use the ones they thought looked cool.

The last step of this project was to cut the doors in half and glue onto each side of the landscape. Then we glued that whole unit onto a new piece of paper and decorated our 'background' with a striped pattern. When they're all hung up and open to see both the doors and landscape inside, they look awesome!

Update on the Art Room and a Wedding!

That's right folks! I got married! Sorry sorry for the lapse in posting that has been going on for awhile. But I just got bogged down in trying to move and then finish planning the wedding and then actually get married! All while only taking a two day break from teaching all my little angels how to make art!

So here's an engagement pic for you all :) Awwww!

And here's an update on what's been happening in the art room!

Kindergarten students are learning about shapes and using them to help draw pictures. We just finished a series of observational drawings using block towers to inspire us. Now they have started on drawing faces using simple shapes. It's been a ton of fun!

1st Grade students have been painting away. We're making a 3-D color wheel! All we have are stacks of painted plates. More to come soon hopefully!

2nd Grade has been working on drawing self-portraits using a picture reference. We've been focusing on using basic shapes to help us start drawings and using symmetry to give us clues for drawing our faces. I have used this project before, but it works well, helping the students to be good observers.

3rd Grade students finished a Landscape project, using two different landscapes. We then cut them up and attached them to an accordion paper. This allows the viewer to see two different Landscapes depending on how they stand when they view the piece. Now students have begun a fruit drawing, They will be painting them next week using Complementary Colors.

4th Grade students finished their Contour Line Self- Portraits and are now working on a Pop Art piece using Grumpy Cat and Analogous Colors. I've also done this project before, but it's a good one.

And lastly, 5th Grade students finished up their shaded crayons, and are beginning on a painting using Aerial Perspective to show depth.

Landscapes... another Visible Thinking Strategy! (Also an update on 4th Grade)

So we're talking about Shapes now! And we're using Shapes to do all sorts of things from cutting them out to drawing people with them. The second grade class is going to draw a landscape using shapes. But first I wanted to see how much they remembered from 1st grade about landscapes. So we talked briefly about what remembered about landscapes and what a landscape included. In every class someone brought up foreground, middle ground, and background! Success!! They must have learned well last year. We talked about that a little more in depth. Then to get everyone really focused we did a Visible Thinking Strategy called See, Think, Wonder.

Students did this in table groups with one writer per table but everyone sharing ideas. They looked at a piece by Thomas Cole called The Oxbow and wrote down what they saw, what they thought about, and what they wondered about as they viewed this piece. Here are some of the results:



Also an update on 4th grade perspective relief sculptures, they turned out so well! Here are a few of the finished product.