Wordless book for the imagination

Where is the Cake by Thé Tjong-Khing is a wordless book with illustrations begging for a story! The pictures allow for very imaginative discussion especially with a young one. There is so much activity happening in the illustrations that the story can change each time you look at it! It is a wonderful way to demonstrate the power of story telling through art.

From Scraps to Cities!

We have started to look at landscapes this week. Today we began by talking about cities. We looked at some of Paul Klee's work including Castle and Sun. We discussed the endless possibilities of what could be happening in the painting as well as the use of many geometric shapes. Students used scraps that we have been collecting all year to create their cityscape. They turned out amazing! Each city has it's own creative story. Be sure to ask your artist what is happening in their scene.


Tunnels and sky scrapers

This student found heart scraps from a Valentine's day project and turned them into birds!

A busy city with bridges and tunnels and buildings


One student saw his city with more dimension. Maybe a future pop-up artist or architect?!

Spring Has Sprung!

Spring is here!.... at least in the halls at school! Today we looked at more of Georgia O'Keeffe's beautiful floral paintings. Students used view finders to "zoom" in on one of the live flowers from the bouquet on their tables. They used pencil to draw an over sized bloom on their page and included texture to their image by taking an even closer look at the actual flower. Next, they carefully and slowly painted these wonderful spring blooms!
Can't you smell the fresh spring air?!

Plenty o' Poppies!

In preparation for the play this year we have started to transform the hallway to a field of poppies from the Wizard of Oz. The kids created more than 300 poppies to decorate the hall!
Not only does it get us in the spirit of the play but it's also a nice preview of spring!
Enjoy the sunshine and snow this week. It's perfect for forts, snowmen, sculpture and if you happen to find a stick, like my three year old, it is great snow to draw in!
See you in the halls!

Happy Valentine's Day!

This week we kicked off Valentine's Day a little early in art class. The project was to create a Valentine animal and incorporate a heart into it. Here are some of the examples of fun and wonderful artwork! I wish I could frame them all!

A Shadow Book

The Foggy Foggy Forest by Nick Sharratt is a perfect book to talk about shadows and silhouettes. I wish that I had found it before we were talking about the shadows of Punxsutawney Phil and our Matisse shadow art project from last week!
It has wonderful silhouettes that are printed on translucent paper. It is fun to guess what might be behind the dark images. When you turn the page it reveals what it is in color! I think this book could be a fun read for kids of all ages!

Matisse Shadow

There was a lot of discussion last week about what was happening in Matisse's Icarus so we took another look at it again this week. Some ideas that students had were that the image was dancing, swimming, leaping, doing a cartwheel or floating in space. We talked about the idea that perhaps the image was a shadow of someone.
Today students started by cutting out a shadow image. Next, they used the skills they learned last week to draw a person in the same position as the shadow. After the outline of their person was complete they added background and features to their person to allow the viewer to recognize what activity is happening in the image.
It's wonderful how many ideas came out of one shadow image!