On Friday, we revisited one of our favourite Canadian artists, Ted Harrison. Last year we used tissue and black paper silhouettes to make our pictures. This year we tried painting with tempera paints. We looked at several of his paintings online and in the books we have in our library. We talked about how he uses line and colour. We knew that all the work we have done with mixing tints and shades would really come in handy!
For art this week we looked at the work of American Artist Jasper Johns. We found this lesson at For the Love of Art ,another great art blog that Mrs. Watson follows.
We folded our paper into 16 squares and then used the letters in our first names to make a pattern. We used oil pastels for the letters and then watered down tempera paint to make the background for each square.
Jasper Johns Inspired Names on PhotoPeach
As part of our 100’s Day celebration we drew pictures of what we think we might look like when we are 100. After we drew and coloured our pictures we crumpled them up into little balls to add even more wrinkles. This is the first time we have ever crumpled up our work, but we love how they turned out. We also painted wallpaper for the background of our self portraits. We hope you like them!
We had so much fun making Jim Dine inspired hearts last week that we decided to try some more! We set up five stations around the classroom where the students could create their hearts. We could choose from tissue paper, tempera wash & salt, chalk & oil pastels, felts & crayons, and tempera paint. This art lesson came from the Kids Artists Blog. We think they turned out great!
Jim Dine Revisited on PhotoPeach
In honour of Chinese New Year we decided to draw dragons 龍. We started by practicing our dragons step by step together. We used common shapes, like the letter “S” and circles, to make it easier. After we practiced we drew our dragons on large pieces of paper and coloured them with our felts. To finish them off we used different colours of chalk to make the background.
Fay and Jenny taught us how to say dragon in chinese. This is the character for dragon 龍 and phonetically you would spell it Lóng.
This morning we decided to try painting in the style of Artist Jim Dine. We looked at many of his paintings, especially the heart ones, before we got started.
I told the students that we would not be painting on paper today and asked them to guess what we would be using as our canvas. They couldn’t believe that they were going to paint their desks! We had so much fun finger painting our backgrounds right onto our desks and then taking a print.
While our backgrounds were drying we used styrofoam meat trays to make our hearts. We cut them out and added details using a blunt pencil. Next we used black tempera paint to print our hearts on our backgrounds. After the hearts dried we added details using oil pastels.
This was definitely the most fun we have had doing art and it wasn’t even all that messy 🙂
Jim Dine Hearts on PhotoPeach
Inspiration for this lesson came from a very similar lesson at MaryMaking.
Today we painted beautiful ocean scenes and added lighthouses that we made out of paper. We have a lighthouse on our island and so we were really excited about today’s project.
This great art lesson came from Deep Space Sparkle.
This week we started reading Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat and so we decided to try and paint our own owls. We practiced drawing owls first and then began our paintings. We learned about “double loading” our paint brushes today and loved the realistic feathers we were able to paint using this technique. This is another great art lesson from Deep Space Sparkle.
Owls in the Classroom on PhotoPeach
We tried another great art lesson from we heart art beore Christmas break, but I forgot to share the pictures.
The students drew the same snowman from three different points of view. We always have so much fun painting!
Snowmen II on PhotoPeach
We love art! We have been very busy the last week. We made a special mural and gingerbread men to decorate for our Christmas celebration, all sorts of tree decorations, and beautiful snowflake snowmen.
There are some very special elves hiding in our mural!
North Pole Mural on PhotoPeach
These cute snowmen were inspired by a lesson on we heart art .
Snowflake Snowmen on PhotoPeach