Third Grade Van Gogh Corn

In Third grade we are looking at Van Gogh's painting style and how it shows movement with his short brush strokes working together to fill his canvas.  We also discussed the drawing technique Contour Drawing.  We learned when Artists make contour drawings, they are focusing on three things- Shapes found in the object they are drawing, the outline of the object and any details that can be seen on the object.

We practiced Van Gogh's painting technique, using two lines for guide lines and then placing our short brush strokes around them.  These are some examples of the practices:

Our final artwork combines our contour drawing where we looked at some Fall Harvest Corn and then filled the background with our painting technique.

Fifth Grade Zen Doodle Animals

In Fifth Grade, our first project had us working with Contour Drawing and Zen Doodles.  We first looked at different types of contour drawing- Blind contour, where the artist does not look at their paper while drawing and Guided contour, where the artist can look at their paper while drawing.  These two types allow for the concentration on details that help to make the subject of the drawing unique. 

We then looked at Zen Doodles which are various types of line patterns that are used to fill up a space.  We placed the patterns inside of our animal contour drawings.  For the background of our artwork, the students used paint and had the option to create any type of background for their animal.  Some students created very detailed backgrounds that provided their animal with an environment, it was great seeing all of their background ideas!

I have a lot of images, it was hard to select just a few! :)