Louise Bourgeois Spiders

Spider sculptures by the 8th grade class.

Spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois

Big Pencils

Still in progress large scale pencils by the 3rd grade.

Color Mixing with Tissue Paper

K2 worked on mixing colors and transparency with colored tissue paper. 

Once it was dry they added black trees using construction paper.

K2 Birthday Birds

Lots of Birthdays in K2 class this week!!

Drawing Reflection

We had some time left in class this week so I did a quick lesson on drawing a sailboat with it's reflection in water. The first grade students used oil pastel to draw the first boat on the fold line. After that they folded the paper and rubbed it so the pastel would transfer to the other side. This was the guide for them to draw the mirror image of the boat. Last they added the water on top.

Silhouetted Hunted House

Halloween is a great time to bring in a lesson on silhouettes. It's not as easy as you may think to make a drawing in all silhouettes. You have to always be thinking in reverse. The 2nd grade and I brainstormed things that we know are in silhouette and looked at examples. One great one we looked at was an animated movie by Lotte Reiniger. She was making children's animations before Disney and all with cut paper and a stop motion camera. It really is beautiful.

This is a link to the movie we watched "Hansel and Gretel".

Christmas in October

The Catholic School Foundation holds a Christmas card art contest every year. The entries are due in October, so the 5th grade class got to work on Christmas projects now. I played some seasonal music to get us in the mood. 

In addition I integrated a lesson on Cubism. We talked about Picasso and other artist who started the Cubism movement and how it was significant to the start of Abstract art. 

The requirements for this project was the following: Incorporated the theme "Jesus Brings Peace" for a Christmas card in a Cubism style using warm and cool colors to separated the objects from the background. As I thought they handled it quite well. The only down side is that we do not get to keep the original art. I made sure to photograph everything before it got mailed off. 

Good luck everyone!

Painting a Night Sky

Sometimes a student will randomly say that they are in the mood to paint. We don't do it a lot in class because it's more work (clean up, dry time ect.). I get it though. Sometimes you just need to paint. It is a satisfying feeling to put paint to paper. It can also be scary to some. They feel the pressure to get it just right and you don't get to erase it. I try to make it stress free in the classroom and make the projects more about experimenting and learning how to use the tools.

The past two weeks the 6th grade worked on these outdoor night scenes. They used their brushes to produce a textural night sky and silhouettes of trees.