Picasso’s Faces

I have been discussing Pablo Picasso in most of my 4th and 5th grade classes.  Students love looking at Picasso’s many faces and learning about cubism.  They love how you don’t have to draw realistic and the faces look distorted.  We started by drawing the profile drawing first.  They have to look at someone they sit with to understand how you see someone from the side.  Then we draw the other half of the face from the front.  We add the facial details and discuss how you would see hair from the front and side of a person.  They have to add lines and create pattern in the background.  Students trace all pencil lines with a black marker and then color the entire project in oil pastel.  Oil pastel allows the students to mix and blend colors along with keeping the colors bold.  These are so much fun to look at in the hallway.

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Lines, lines, everywhere there’s lines…

This bulletin board is a combination of the third grade’s Starry, Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh and the six grade’s black ink square designs.  I got the Starry, Starry Night example from my friend and fellow art teacher, Michelle Osborne.  We looked at Van Gogh’s artwork and discussed lines, emotions and color.  The kids loved creating the sky portion of this project.

Sixth grade created a composition of overlapping squares in black ink.  They had to create a pattern, but never repeat it.  This project helped a lot of my six grade ARTalympic students.  Students had to also incorporate their name somewhere into the composition.  I liked both of these projects so I decided to hang them together.

Party Over Here…

We have been studying Pop Art and the artist Wayne Thiebaud.  He is a famous American painter that painted cakes and pastries with bold and exaggerated colors.  Students learned how to draw three dimensional cake and cake stands. They used a horizon line to help organize space.  They had to color the cake stand in cool colors and use warm colors on their cake.  We discussed different cake and icing flavors along with fun toppings.  Students added sprinkles to the background with oil pastels.  This mixed media project turned out very colorful and the students loved creating cakes with a slice missing.