Tuesday, April 29, 2014

3rd Grade - Portraits

The third graders got a lesson in realism with this project, before we again embraced our creative juices and headed in a different direction.  The idea was to draw an accurate portrait of yourself or a classmate, then turn that realistic portrait into however you wanted to see the subject.  The result is some awesome and a little twisted portraiture where some faces have extra eyeballs and random scars all over their faces.  Take a look!













Monday, April 28, 2014

Art Club - Collaborative Whiteboard Animation

It's sad to see Art Club come to a close, but I think we topped it off with a winner.  First, we looked at a handful of whiteboard animations on YouTube and then worked together to create our own in the art room.  We divided up into 2 lines and took turns making small lines on the board while I took pictures using stop motion software on my Galaxy Note.  We finished (spoiler alert) by signing our names and adding music.  Take a look!


2nd Grade - Making Mistakes

It seems like too often I’m approached by a student who tells me they messed up and need to start over, so we took some time with our younger students to talk about art and problem solving.  I explain it like this:  when you sit down to draw something, you have a bunch of little problems to solve. 

What am I going to draw?  Where am I going to put it?  What is it going to look like?  How am I going to draw it? 


We run into problems when we don’t work hard to figure these questions out.  So for this project, the second graders made mistakes (on purpose), and then had to figure out how to fix them on their way to the completed drawing.  Every once in a while I would give the signal “Oops!” and the kids would close their eyes and make a mark on their paper, not knowing exactly where it would go.  When they looked down at it they had to figure out what to do with it – whether that meant turning that mark into something else or covering it up with something else.  It was very encouraging to hear students working through their problems.  Here a few examples of finished work.  I bet you can’t tell where all the mistakes came from!








Saturday, April 26, 2014

4th Grade - Mouths

We’ve updated our fourth grade clay project this year, and I have to say I think it’s pretty awesome.  The process is simple:  take a chunk of clay, hollow it out with a loop tool so that it looks like a mouth, then add details to the outside like eyes, nose, or spikes.  Some teeth or a tongue is a nice touch.  The results are hilarious, and the kids had a blast making them.



























2nd Grade - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Second graders really rose to the challenge on this one.  Designed as a project to help build vocabulary and serve as practice for really seeing the details in composition, second graders partnered up and took turns describing artwork to each other.  While one person kept the real picture secret, the other partner had to take clues and try to redraw the picture as accurately as possible.  Here’s a video of the kids in action, followed by a few pictures and some of the final results.