It has been a great start to the year! Our opening project that all of out students collaborated on is "The Line that Connects Us All." We are all unique but when we come together, at school, our lives touch and we are all connected.
Each student was asked to create an artwork that represents themselves. In order to make it collaborative, the students were asked to draw a line between 2 dots on their papers (3 inches up from the bottom). When placed directly side by side each student's art connects with all the other students' art! The line that runs through all of the artworks is "The Line that Connects us All." We are all unique but when we come together at school our lives touch and we are all connected.
Once students bring these home they can connect their artworks at home with their siblings' art and a new collaborative work is born. In this case, the line illustrates their family connection.
The book I used to kick off this project was Andrew Drew and Drew which I give a whole hearted 5 stars for creativity and artistic encouragement!
Fourth grade used the program "Acorn" to create their own versions of "The Scream," by Edvard Munch!
Acorn is a simplified (and somewhat glitchy) version of Photoshop. I really liked using this with my older students because it is so close to Photoshop that I feel like they are getting a real world experience.
This was a totally new experience for me because I have mostly stayed away from computer art partly because of computer availability but it finally felt like the right year to jump in! My first class was a huge learning curve for the kids AND myself. By the second class, my process for teaching on Acorn was SO much more streamlined! (Thanks kids for bearing with me!!!)
Learning Goals: I can...
- Create a file in Acorn that is US Letter sized
- Use Google Drive to download "The Scream" from a shared folder
- Use Preview to open "The Scream" and to pick colors from the original artwork "The Scream"
- Use Acorn tools and modify size and opacity: Paint brush, bucket, smudge, eraser, eyedropper
- Use Photo Booth to take a picture and insert it into Acorn
- Use layers and change visibility
- Convert Acorn file to JPEG
- Drop JPEG into a shared google folder to submit it to Mrs. Seitz
At Bauer all of the teachers were Emojis for Halloween!
Today in art class the kids learned a bit about the history of emojis! The younger kids focused more on emotions and how to draw an emotional face. The older kids pulled together their creative ideas to create their own unique emojis!
Fourth graders read the book "Klimt and his Cat" and looked at the artwork of Gustav Klimt. They discovered that he makes his trees with interesting spiral branches.
First we talked about what a landscape is and then we painted our own landscapes using the cool color family (blue, green and purple) for the land and the warm color family (red, yellow, and orange) for the sky. We used a loose watercolor technique which involved blending colors and bending our paper to cause the colors to drip.
Next, we practiced our brush technique for getting smooth edges as we painted our trees. Finally, it was time for embellishments. We used gold paint and jewels to embellish our Klimt trees. Klimt is well known for his use of gold paint!
Learning Goals: I can...
- Create a tree in the style of Klimt
- Tell about Klimt
- Blend analogous (neighbor) colors using watercolor paint
- Paint smooth spiraling lines
Fourth graders are so enthusiastic about creating these Chinese dragons. We talked about the difference between the European dragon and the Chinese dragon. The Chinese dragon is a symbol of good luck and wisdom. It is a symbol of power for people who are worthy of it and a creature to be feared by fools and evildoers. The European dragon on the other hand is typically an unruly dreadful beast feared by all for its ruthlessness.
We talked about how the appearance of the Chinese dragon has changed over time. It has become a creature that flies with a serpent's body, hawk claws, cow ears and the whiskers and scales of a carp (koi).
We also learned the Chinese Waterfall Legend. It tells if the koi fish that swam up the Yellow river against the current and tried for 100 years to jump up the waterfall. When he finally made it, he became a dragon that chases pearls of wisdom. We talked about the life lessons that this story teaches us such as perseverance.
The dragon is a huge part of Chinese culture and makes many appearances at celebrations. We also watched some dragon dance videos while we worked. Notice that it is chasing a pearl of wisdom!
The main art concept that we talked about during this project was color blending. We talked about how to layer colors to blend, and we talked about using water to help colors to smoothly transition on our papers.
Does it Blend Well?
YES: 2 Primary Colors, 2 Analogous Colors (next door neighbors on the color wheel)
NO: 3 Primary Colors, Complementary Colors (opposites on the color wheel), Secondary Colors
When we talk about blending, I explain that our goal is to use vibrant rainbow colors on our artwork, so it's important to know how to avoid brown.
Next, we do some color math. I explain that to make brown, you combine all 3 primary colors. I write out this basic equation on the board...
Red+Yellow+Blue = Brown
Then, we simplify the equation a variety of ways:
If, R+Y=O, and Y+B=G, and R+B=P, and R+Y+B= Brown then...
(R+Y)+B= O+B = Brown ...or...
(Y+B)+R= G+R = Brown ...or...
(R+B)+Y= P+Y = Brown
As it turns out, when we simplify the equation we end up with complementary pairs: (notice that these are on the "NO" list).
Orange and Blue
Green and Red
Purple and Yellow
Why can't we blend secondary colors together Mrs. Seitz? To answer this question we expand the equations and discover that all 3 of the primary colors are present in the mixtures.
Orange + Green = (R+Y)+(B+Y)
Green + Purple = (Y+B)+(R+B)
Purple + Orange = (B+R)+(R+Y)
The color math really helps the kids understand the reasons behind what works and what doesn't. It also gives them a way to figure it out if they haven't memorized what works. When I teach it this way, it creates an ah-ha moment for many of the kids. At this point in the year, my 4th graders are really quite good with color concepts because we have already done our Kandinsky color mixing lesson with fractions!
Learning Goals: I can...
- Explain the difference between Chinese and European dragons
- Tell about Chinese dragons
- Blend using analogous colors (next door neighbors)
- Give examples of colors that do and do not blend well
Kids in 4th grade created these awesome Pop Art self-portraits! We learned about Andy Warhol for this project. Warhol enjoyed repetition and color! He often drew the same every day (POPular) objects, people and animals over and over again and colored them differently each time.
You might recognize this famous Warhol artwork!
Here are some great books that we looked at!
First, students outlined their facial features on an 8.5 x 11 photograph. Then they colored the back of the photo with pencil. The pencil on the back of the paper worked like carbon paper and helped the kids transfer their outlines onto large paper. We taped the photo to each corner of the large paper and traced the photo outlines in each corner. The kids were very impressed with this reprinting trick!
We also talked about complementary colors (opposites) and how they make each other POP when placed side by side!
Learning Goals: I can...
- Tell about Andy Warhol and Pop Art
- Simplify a photograph by outlining facial features
- Create a graphite transfer
- Create a self-portrait in the style of Andy Warhol
- Use complementary colors to make the artwork pop
- Explain what complementary colors are and how they can be used
It's that time again! Your child has already received their free Square 1 Art stickers and order forms have been sent home! If you would like to order merchandise with your child's artwork on it please submit your order by the due date!
The grade with the highest percentage of orders will get an additional clay project this year!
Due Dates:
Bauer Elementary: November 10, 2015
Forest Gove Elementary: November 16, 2015
Items will be delivered to school before Christmas break so they could make for great gifts! (A percentage of each order goes to support the art room!)
Fourth graders learned about the art of creating a coil pot through the story, "The Pot that Juan Built." This is a fantastic story that not only shares great information about how coil pots are made but tells a wonderful story about Juan Quezada. Juan Quezada is a Mexican artist who brought his family and community out of poverty. He figured out how to make fantastic pots and taught those around him to make and sell these fine works of art!
Learning Goals: I can...
- Tell about Juan Quezada
- Create a coil pot using clay building techniques
- Paint my coil pot in a unique way
Fourth graders got to do this neat mind bending project. We began by looking at the work of MC Escher who loved both math (geometry) and art. As you can see he did very planned and precise artwork!
We talked about how visual illusions are artworks that tease your brain and make you think! MC Escher was a master of illusions! Students also pointed out right away that MC Escher is very good at using value (shading) to create the illusion of form (3D shapes). This was a concept that we studied earlier.
Next we used pre-made tessellation animal stencils to tessellate 5 animals. It was a challenge to figure out how each of the animals fit perfectly into itself. There is always a good amount of head scratching on this step! Afterwards, I point out to the kids that it was tricky to use the pre-made stencils but imagine how much trickier it would have been to invent this art!
The next class we actually created our own tessellation tile out of a square lined index card and used it to fill in the background!
In order to reference MC Escher's "Drawing Hands" picture students were encouraged to cut out a photo of their own drawing hand or MC Escher's!
Learning Goals: I can...
- Tell about MC Escher (illusion, tessellations)
- Create a tessellation
- Use pattern
- Use contrasting color families to make animals stand out from the background
