What's Going on in the Classroom: Acrylic Painting and Mixed Media Triptychs

I know it's been awhile since my last blog post. All I can say is that our school's art show has finally come and gone and that is my excuse for taking up all my time and keeping me away from this here blog!
We have been working on many different things in our foundations class, but here are the most recent! An acrylic portrait and a mixed media triptych. These two pieces gave my students experiences with acrylic, chalk pastels, oil pastels, and colored pencils. They also studied different color schemes and coloring mixing during these assignments.
With all that in mind, check out these examples:

What's Going on in the Classroom- Mixed Media Paintings

Have I mentioned that I love our painting unit? Not only are students sitting quietly and working hard, but they are producing some amazing images! After creating a watercolor composition, we moved into mixed media pieces. For this piece I limited the subject matter a little bit. Each student had to incorporate hand into their mixed media composition. That hand had to be interacting with an object or item. So it was somewhat limited, but the object or item and how the hand interacts with it is up to the student to decide. We spent some time taking our own reference pictures of hands with objects and then we practiced how to draw a hand. I made up a little worksheet to get them started, it looks something like this...

After this basic intro to figure drawing, we talked about how to draw the different hand positions that each student wanted to use. This was mostly done individually between myself and each student. The steps after this were to draw the hand and object lightly with pencil on illustration board and then do light watercolor washes of basic colors to fill in the image. Then student could the choose to use oil pastels, chalk pastels, and/or colored pencils to had shading (depth) and details to their image. Here is what we have so far... we're spending the rest of the week on it as well so these aren't quite done yet.

Practice drawings and sketching out the final image

Finally starting to do some painting!

Claude Monet- Impressionism in 3rd Grade

Hello all!
It's been awhile, and I can only pin it down to the end of the school year. There are so many field trips and assemblies and testing, which for the art room means tracking down students to have them make up and finish projects. It also means end of the year graduation projects and grades and observations by principles! Ah! Not to mention trying to teach everything before you run out of time!

Here's a little peak into what is going on in the art room. Our third grade students are studying Claude Monet and Impressionism. We talked about lot about Monet's life and work. We also discussed the common themes in Impressionist paintings; i.e. light, fleeting moments of time, short brush strokes, color...

Now I know the traditional Impressionist project for elementary in the waterlilies with the bridge and sit tight, because I will get to that! But we started with Monet's House of Parliament.

With that as a jumping off point, each student selected a famous building that they wanted to use and did a drawing of it. Then we used watercolor to paint the building a dark color and the background colorful with lots of light.


The Impressionist piece came in when we used chalk pastels in the background only! To create the small brushstrokes so common in Impressionist painting. I told students they could use whatever colors they wanted, but they had to use small marks and all the marks had to go in the same direction.

Now that those pieces are finished, I wanted to push students to use their paint brushes like they would, if they were Impressionist painters. Now we're getting to the good old waterlilies and bridge!

First we taped of the bridge using masking tape. We talked about how this would protect the paper and we could go back later, take the tape off and have a wonderful bridge to design.

Then students used mostly cool colors, with a little bit of yellow here and there and short brush strokes!! The technique for each student varied, but the look of these Impressionist paintings is great! Stay tuned for the finished project.

Hubble Space Telescope: There is color in space!

I want kids to be excited about color. I think color is one of the most exciting elements of art and it can be used to create so many different effects in a student's artwork. Color is all around us, we think clouds are white  but really they are full of greys and purples and yellows and blues and greens. We think the water is blue but it's not, it's full of all sorts of colors and reflections.

In second grade we talked about space and the color that is in space. We discussed the colors that we see when we look at space, and how it seems to be only a couple of colors. Then we talked about the Hubble Space Telescope. We looked at pictures of it and discovered how it worked. ( Hubble Space Telescope website) But what we really spent time looking at was the pictures that it sends back to Earth. Man these pictures have some great color! (Video of Hubble Pictures) This project inspiration came from this blog, check it out! makeitawonderfullife.blogspot.com

The students practiced using chalk pastels. They practiced several techniques that I demonstrated (blending colors together, putting colors on top of each other, making the edges of shapes fuzzy, and using scrap paper to mask an area of their artwork.) and they also just plain got comfortable with the medium.

On the second day of this project, I had several pictures taken from the Hubble Telescope. Again I did a demo to show students how  one of those pictures would translate into a chalk pastel drawing. We discussed how my picture didn't look exactly like the Hubble Telescope pictures and that was okay because we were just using the pictures as inspiration (where we get ideas) rather than trying to copy them. Students went to town and boy did a lot of them turn out great! What an awesome project to explore color. The students were so excited to learn all about how the telescope worked and they really got into the idea of color in space. I loved this project, easy and inspiring and definitely full of color!