First Grade Picasso Portraits

In first grade we are just finishing discussing Pablo Picasso and how he created his artwork using cubism.  We viewed as a group a lot of Picasso's paintings and discussed how he used shapes within each image to help create the subject.

We also reviewed the warm and cool colors, which all of my groups this year ROCKED! All the hard work and focus in Kindergarten is really paying off with their recall.

We took the idea of Picasso's paintings and how they utilized cubism to create our own portraits.  Within each portrait, students were asked to divide the space into shapes as well as the background.  We used crayons to color in and a felt tip marker for outlining when we finished coloring.  Here are some of our final products:

                                                        

Second Grade Pointillism Landscape

In Second grade we are finishing our project where we explored the painting technique of Pointillism.  We discussed the Artist Georges Seurat and his paintings, looking at his use of colors and Pointillism.

We learned about the different parts of a Landscape Artwork- Foreground, Middle ground, and Background.  We created sketches where we used our knowledge of the Landscape parts and created our own Landscapes.

After discussing the parts of a Landscape, we started looking at Georges Seurat and his paintings- focusing on his use of Pointillism.  We practiced Pointillism by creating a color wheel and using markers to give the illusion of the colors mixing to create the desired color.  In Pointillism, the painter places colors close together to trick the eye into mixing them.

Here are some of our color wheel practices:

Here is our final Pointillism Landscape:

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.

First Grade Hundertwasser Paintings

First graders finished their project in which they learned about the German artist and architect Hundertwasser.  We also discussed the warm and cool colors along with Hundertwasser's work.  The students used circles, spirals and squiggly lines within their paintings because Hundertwasser did not enjoy working with straight lines.

The students created two paintings, one warm colored painting and one cool colored.  They then selected one to be their background and one for their flowers.  The flower paper was cut out and glued onto their background to create their Hundertwasser inspired painting.

Second Grade Warm and Cool Cityscape

Second graders finished their project focusing on warm and cool colors and three-dimensional forms.  We first practiced making the forms (cubes, spheres, cones, etc...) then we practiced making our sky pattern with the warm or cool colors.  They had a lot of fun creating their own cities, I had fun watching their ideas sprout and grow!

The materials we used were Oil Pastels for the sky and colored pencils for the buildings.