India Ink

India ink a new medium for my students, but they are doing a great job mastering it! Personally, it is one of my favorite mediums to work with. You can get such great line quality by using different brushes, pens, and twigs. Bamboo is a great subject to start with; it's relatively easy but the results are always very cool:

Pop Art

PoP ArT

Lower school just finished up a unit on Pop Art. Students had a great time testing their understanding of the style by playing the game Pop or Not! I showed students a slideshow of famous art and they had to guess whether or not it was pop...or not! 4th graders practiced drawing three-dimensional objects by making Andy Warhol inspired soup cans:

3rd grade studied Wayne Theibaud's (pronouced "Tebow") dessert series and created ceramic cupcakes. The construction is basically two pinch pots; one for the frosting, the other for the base. We created the ridges by pressing the base into a rubber cupcake mold.

Monet Waterlilies

Kindergarten traveled to the art room for this assignment. The previous art teacher painted Monet's Waterlilies on the wall; it served as a visual aid as my little artists learned how to do small, visible impressionistic brushstrokes.

Two Point Perspective

Two point perspective is a technique that uses two vanishing points and two orthogonal lines to create a 3D image on a 2D surface. Middle school students used this technique to create a 3D fantasy tree house. We were inspired by several artists and architects that have taken their designs to new heights:
Tree House on Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art
 

Korowai people of Papua New Guinea


Oregon, USA


Student designs

Op Art

2D students are in the process of creating their first masterpiece. We studied the Op Art movement and then embarked on creating our own mind-bending pieces. Here are a few nearing completion:

2D Art: Fundamentals of Drawing

The first week of 2D Art, middle schoolers learned the basics of drawing. We focused our early lessons on learning to draw by observation...there will be plenty of time for abstract art later in the semester! The students began by drawing still lifes of simple shapes (cones, spheres, cubes, etc...) with value and contour lines. We also took a day to do a quick refresher on the color wheel. Students did a great job creating gradients with warm and cool colors. They worked hard to get the mechanics of creating a smooth transition between the colors. No Neopolitan ice cream allowed here! The week concluded with a rather tasty exercise. We drew donuts! They were, of course, allowed to eat them at the end of class.

 

I Have A Dream

In celebration of MLK Day, 2nd graders drew portraits of Martin Luther King. They did a great job studying the historical photographs of him. At the end of the project I challenged students to think of a dream they have for our current world. Here are a few of the results. Enjoy!