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!

What's Going on in the Classroom: Hand Coloring Photographs

I'm hopeful that everyone's Thanksgiving was amazing and the break was a much-needed breather from the joys of teaching. My photography students just finished experimenting with hand coloring their photographs. We used fiber-based paper instead of RC paper and students used a rigorous washing process to make sure the chemicals completely left the fiber based paper.

After the print was developed and washed students put it in a blotting book for 24 hours and then used the hot press to remove any remaining moisture. Then they were ready to color! We practiced using water colors and colored pencils and I encouraged students to chose one area that would complement their idea or concepts with the photo that they took. Here are a couple of examples, these are black and white film prints that have been hand colored:

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!