Picasso inspired self portraits

What a wonderful way to come back to school- Bright smiling faces ready to create art! This week we began class by looking at Picasso's Portrait of Dora Maar and Weeping Woman. Students observed the different shapes, line, color and textured patterns in his work. We discussed what the differences between an abstract portrait and a photograph are. We then discussed what the term self portrait means. This term was new to many students.
Next students did a warm up self portrait drawing exercise. They are marvelous and I intend to put them on display soon! Following the warm up, students created a self portrait inspired by the style of Picasso by using scraps of paper to cut shapes and then draw facial features. After most of their features were complete they assembled them into a portrait and completed it by adding any missing elements they felt it needed.
Again, the room was full of fun and artistic chatter as the portraits were being assembled and coming to life!

Alphabet Ideas

Image courtesy of designspongeonline.com

I found this wonderful blog post on how to make your own flash card at designspongeonline.com
It has a FREE pdf download so you can make your own. You only need 7 sheets of card stock and a creative imagination for words.
I thought a great extension to this might be to draw pictures for each letter. What a wonderful gift set of cards for anyone! A great set of cards for a baby, a child just learning to read, Grandparents, or any adult!
This could be a fun project to help students recognize sounds and letters especially if they are involved in the process of choosing the word and drawing the picture that goes with the letter. Oh the possibilities!

Recycling Jars into Snow Globe Art!

Because we have a collection of little baby food jars in our recycling bin, I thought it might be fun to do something arty with my 3 year old by using them. So we made a snow globe! It's not really in the holiday spirit but fun none the less! I think we may end up with a little snow globe village by the end of the winter break! Here's a "how to" with some other fun suggestions.

Materials needed
a glass jar with a tight fitting lid
shrinky dink material or plastic toy
waterproof glue
distilled water
liquid glycerin (from a craft store- Joann fabric or Michaels)
glitter!

Create your scene on the inside of the lid and glue it down. Let it dry.

Fill the jar with water, a squirt of glycerin (which helps the glitter move around, I didn't have any so we skipped this part) add the glitter. Screw the lid on tightly (I add a bit of glue to the inside of lid to make sure that it stays on and little fingers don't open it to see how it works. It's best to let this dry before you flip and shake it). Next flip it over and watch the glitter fall over your scene. You could glue little people, animals, robots, you name it! I just put a little felt on the bottom of this one to cover the cap.

If you are using shrinky dink material. Follow the shrinky dink instructions by creating your drawing and baking it before you begin.
Another fun idea is to create a family portrait drawing and shrink it to fit into the snow globe.

Snowmen at Night

Snowmen at Night by Caralyn and Mark Buehner is an imaginative winter rhyming book about what snowmen do in the evening when we are all in bed! I began class by reading this book and then we discussed some of the illustrations. We talked about how the illustrator painted the objects that are further away smaller and objects close up bigger. We briefly reviewed complimentary colors again as well as Van Gogh's style of how to create movement or wind in Starry Starry Night. Students used oil pastels to create a large, close up snowman portrait complete with patterned scarves, buttons and hats. Then they worked on the background imagery making objects further away smaller, creating movement in the style of Van Gogh and perhaps adding evening stars and a moon.


I love the movement in the snowman's hair on this one!

Snow Globes

Yahoo! The snow is finally here!
This week we continued our discussion of complimentary colors. We took an up close look at Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to see how he used complimentary colors to enhance his paintings. Many students thought this scene looked similar to Lake Harriet. Next students drew a snow globe, cut it out and then created a family portrait. Using complimentary colors students decorated the base by creating a pattern. We added a bit of sparkle with glitter glue to enhance the snow falling in their pictures! They took so much time in carefully drawing each family member, sometimes including pets, it was marvelous to hear the stories they told as they described them to me.

The upper level also worked on cutting snowflakes for the hallway. There is something magical that happens after you make the cuts and then open it up to see what you have created. One student just kept folding and opening and refolding in awe over what he made. It was fun to watch. Another student in the upper level was so inspired by our complimentary color conversation he carried it over to the snowflake production. See the picture below. He paired yellow and purple together, blue and orange, and lastly red and green.

3D snowflakes

Bring on the snow! I have been creating snowflakes all over the house in hopes that it would some how bring a blizzard outside!

These snowflakes are a fun and festive 3d project and much easier to do than they look. I think I will try to do these in small groups at school. It will be a great project to work on dexterity and patience. What better way to embrace the season than to take over the halls with snow!

I found this fabulous site that has a very easy tutorial on how to make them. Click here
They look amazing when done with colorful scrap-booking paper. Old wallpaper scraps could work well too!

Think snow!!!

Complimentary Colors

We have been discussing color theory for the past couple of months and this week we continued by looking at complimentary colors. To begin the class we looked at a self portrait of Van Gogh. We discussed the many colors he used in the image of himself as well as the complimentary colors he used in the background. We then looked at some of his other work including Starry Starry Night which many students recognized. Students discussed his style of painting in which he uses many dashes or lines that appear to create movement or enhance lit areas in some of his work.
This week's project was to experiment with drawing by creating wind or movement with oil pastels. The next step was to use complimentary color tissue to illuminate their imagery.
The results were whimsical and colorful creations that will look fabulous framed on any wall!