I taught a Saturday art class in the winter and the kids made some fabulous still life artwork. They glued newspaper scraps to the paper then drew an outline in pencil and then traced in black acrylic paint. Then, students painted everything in with colorful tempera and added patterns and designs.
This is from a while ago, perhaps a year ago. But I did this project with my lower elementary students. We learned about Jacob Lawrence and his cityscapes, and then students drew a city with oil pastel. Then, they added black outlines on top with acrylic paint and extra colors with tempera paint. Everything was drawn on cardboard because toned paper adds an extra element of pizzazz. So here they are:
For my Saturday art class this fall, I taught students how to create a lot of sculptures. We started out using clay and students designed sketches of what they wanted to create and then used clay techniques to put together their clay pieces (with air dry clay). They painted their sculptures with tempera. We also made plaster strip sculptures. Students created their base with balled up newspaper and tape and then went over the newspaper with plaster strips. My little kids made pumpkins/jack-o-lanterns and my older kids designed their own sculpture.
These are some of the projects we worked on in Saturday art studio this spring.
The first project we made was these houses:
Jellyfish:
Paper Mache Animals:
Space:
Explorations and Other Projects:
Kindergarten learned about Georgia O’Keeffe today and created their own close-up, enlarged flower artworks. Kindergarteners looked at fake flowers for inspiration, then sketched out their flower in pencil. Then they colored each petal and the background with chalk pastel and smudged the colors together. Lastly, they traced over their pencil lines with black ink using foam brushes. These are the finished artworks! I love how they turned out.
Middle school created hand designs inspired by Hamsa hands.
I’m a bit overwhelmed with teaching right now, but I am doing the best I can. These are some of the artworks from lessons I’ve taught recently.
Upper elementary did these awesome Kehinde Wiley stained glass inspired paintings:
Lower elementary created Alma Thomas inspired paintings:
Kindergarten made these beautiful Jim Dine inspired hearts for Valentine’s Day-ish time:
Lower elementary created textured backgrounds using tempera paint and different texture tools (bubble wrap, corrugated cardboard, palette knifes, bottle caps).
Students then created texture animals on top of the backgrounds. We talked about how we can make the appearance of texture with lines and shapes.
This fall, lower elementary made these lovely fall leaves using chalk pastel and construction paper. Students practiced tracing leaf templates and adding colorful patterns with chalk pastels. Students even experimented with blending and smudging the pastels together.
Kindergarten also created fall leaves using a cool colored paper for the background and a warm colored paper for the leaf. Students also practiced tracing and cutting leaves. With kindergarten, I try to do as much cutting practice as possible so students can continue working on strengthening cutting skills.
Teaching kindergarten about self-portraits is really fun because they come up with such creative ideas and their drawings of themselves are so happy. It’s been a very long and tiring week of teaching but seeing the art my students create always makes me happy and reminds me of the reason I love teaching art.
One kindergarten class drew self-portraits from head to shoulders. They added yarn for hair and buttons/sequins as decorations.
The other kindergarten class painted pictures and then drew a self-portrait of themselves as an artist, holding a paintbrush and painting the background.
Annika Marthinuss 