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.

Advertisement

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.

Colorful Clowns

Kindergarten has been working with shapes and lines to create our colorful clowns.  We talk about the emotions that we feel when we see a clown and what colorful costumes, hair, and makeup they have.  This crayon resist used crayons and watercolor as the media.  We traced all our pencil lines in crayon and then painted in with watercolor.  I also painted with tempera at my other school.  Students tried to cover up all the space on the paper with their clown and polka dots.  Patterns were used on the buttons and stripes.  These creative clowns are always so colorful!

All Dressed Up

2nd graders studied the artist Peter Max and his crazy ties, colors and patterns.  Using symmetry, students created a long sleeve shirt and colored it using complementary colors.  Students could add a pocket with their name and we discussed how their shirt then became asymmetrical.  They loved creating the symmetrical ties and looking at all the crazy patterns we could add.