Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Spring Time Projects!

Spring is upon us and I decided to celebrate the season with some spring related projects.  Here in Texas one of our biggest prides is the state flower, the Bluebonnet!  My 2nd through 5th graders did a mixed media project with Bluebonnets and my Kinder through 1st graders did a festive colored egg hatching into a baby chicken with Bluebonnets in the background.  They were so happy with the results that I had to share the process.

2nd through 5th grade Bluebonnets were done partially in markers.  They created the grass, leaves, and stems in watercolor markers.  Then, we mixed up a small value scale of blue (3 shades) and painted those beautiful petals on.  You can see my painting demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XC794Jtefs


Kinder through 1st grade used markers and a paper plate to make their egg shells, baby chickens, and Bluebonnets.  They started by decorating a paper plate with markers.  They then drew in their chicken, background, and flowers with markers.  Then we cut the paper plate like a broken egg shell and glued it on top of the picture.  You can see the demonstration of my drawing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQIMpnBGYoY


The students really enjoyed this project and are begging me to let them take it home so it must have been a winner!

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Britto Inspired Clovers

In a social media art group that I follow I saw a ton of projects around Valentine's Day inspired by Romero Britto.  I love Britto's artwork but I thought to myself, do I really need to do a heartsy fru fru project based on him?  The answer of course, no!  What's the next holiday coming up?  St. Patricks Day!  This is not a holiday that a lot of people do projects on and if they do they usually have rainbows and pots of gold.  Why not make it a colorful pattern filled piece of art!  So I found some short videos on YouTube that talked about Britto and showed his artwork.  I talked with my students about how he used patterns and colors to show happiness.  We talked about how we find those colors and patterns everywhere and how products now days push those colors and patterns because of how they make people feel.  We talked some about St. Patrick's Day and the real meaning of the holiday vs. the "American version" of the holiday, then we set out to create something different.  We decided on the iconic 4 leaf clover shape and went with a Britto inspired color/pattern pallet to it, purposely staying away from anything generic (green clover, rainbow, pots of gold, leprechauns).  This is what we came up with:

3rd-5th traced a clover shape, outlined and added patterns in sharpie, then colored with oil pastels.  Afterwards they cut it out and pasted it to black 9x9 inch paper.





Kinder-2nd used a clover printout, they colored and added patterns in crayon.  They also cut it out and pasted it to brown paper.  They then could design the brown paper how they wanted.  This picture is a clover that a Kinder student designed.  Unfortunately that Kinder student moved before finishing the project, so I finished it for him and used it as an example. 




If the students finished early, which some did, they got to use my new clipboard station for free draw!  They LOVE free draw, it is such a good early finisher reward.  and I always send them back to make corrections on their work if I feel they didn't put in the right amount of effort.  Some will try anything to finish early but they know I'll send them back if they do so it doesn't happen often. 

A good resource for this drawing center is the printouts I get from my Art Hub For Kids subscription.  I just print these out and laminate them and they're perfect for early finishers or a day of drawing centers!





I hope you enjoyed reading my post.  If you have suggestions or comments please leave a comment below!  Thanks for reading!