Kinder Pattern Pumpkin Collages

This lesson was broken down into a lot of parts....

Part one: A-B Patterns
I folded 9 x 12 yellow paper into four columns.
Students drew vertical AB patterns in each column, traced them with sharpie,
and colored them with oil pastel.
Then we painted the papers with yellow, orange, & red tempera cakes.

Part two: The Vine
Students drew a vine with a leaf on manilla paper.
They painted it in with green tempera paint.



Part three: Background
I have these great leaf texture rubbing tiles-
The goal was for students to do leaf rubbings and have it look like a leaves on the ground or in a pile. Then some of them colored them with marker.

Part four: Cutting (oh my..... big mess, but worth it.)
Students traced and cut a pumpkin out of their pattern painting.
They also cut out their vine and leaf.
We glued these on to the background.

Oil Pastel Pumpkin Vines

The first part of this lesson focused on Contour lines, Positive & Negative space, 

and Organic vs. Geometric lines and shapes.  

 I introduced this piece by Lisa Congdon because I liked the use of a collaged background with the negative shapes

and also a selection of Cary Smith's prints that show great examples of simple yet interesting positive and negative compositions. 

This lesson was focused on organic lines and shapes and we used a pumpkin vine as the main subject. 

Each student drew an organic diagonal line as the vine- and then only the contour of pumpkin leaves and pumpkins. They painted them in with white tempera.

 One of my old high school students was a very active graffiti artist but also a remarkable painter and collage artist. He would always insist on painting white under anything he would paint in order to make the colors and image brighter. He was my inspiration for this base step. (Thanks Rascal) :)

 Day Two... color blending with oil pastels. We went over tertiary colors and I gave the kids yellow, orange, lime green, and grass green oil pastels. They also got a q-tip for blending and a pointy stick for scratching details.

I specifically showed them how to make the pumpkin look more round by highlighting the side with yellow first and then blending orange. I also demonstrated blending the various greens for the vine and leaves. Most of my students have never done much color blending before so they were enamored by this and also very successful. They could also scratch back into the oil pastel with the stick. 

 Unfortunately they did not translate as well to camera :( 

I love how they match up though and look so striking when they are all arranged together. 

Extra Large Acorns

This was a quick, easy, and successful lesson focused on printing, texture, & earth tones. 

Day one - draw the shape of the acorn on a 9x12 paper taking up the entire space. 

 Students painted around the outline with black tempera and then printed with cardboard strips dipped in black tempera to create the acorn top texture. 

 Day Two- introduction to Earth Tones. Students mixed different shades of brown by mixing brown, white, and orange. They painted in the top part first, using the printed lines as a guide. 

 Then most students made an attempt at color blending and mixing more shades of brown to fill in the bottom. 

 We are going to cut them out this week and hang them on the giant tree in the hallway. 

2-day Apple Still Life

My first graders looked at some of Cezanne's still life paintings with apples and looked closely at how the apples have different hues of red, yellow, and green. 

They painted three apples by mixing yellow and red tempera paint over turquoise or green paper. 

We reviewed warm colors and cool colors and examined Matisse's apple painting and how the warm colored apples and table stand out against the cool color background. 

To finish these the kids designed tablecloths with oil pastels. 

They were so into the concept of a still life that they wanted to do their own still life pictures as their extra time drawings when they finished their oil pastel. 

So today I set up still life arrangements (of containers and art supplies) for the FIRST GRADERS to draw from today and also went over the concepts of overlapping and viewpoints. They were so into it! 

 We just started them today but I had to share!

Kinder Observational Leaf Drawings

Kindergarten is studying the concept of size in their regular classes. 

For this lesson students painted with warm color watercolors and we added a little salt. 

The students learned about the concept of "observational" drawing and how to look at the an item closely to identify the shapes and details. 

They needed to draw a Small/Medium/Large leaf and if they had extra time and extra-small or extra-large. The borders were collaged with an extra painting we did 

and q-tips dipped in metallic copper paint. 

Simple but I thought they did a nice job!

unexpected sources of motivation & inspiration

I had a really interesting weekend and Monday!

Today I saw Shine Brite Zamorano's post about Lee Gainer mentioning our cylinder lesson on her blog! So cool!
I emailed her today as well to thank her- she sent along two more great artist resources too:
Amy Genser and Hadieh Shafie
She also mentioned she was partially influenced by SUSHI for the body of work that we examined.

Additionally, this weekend I was in Baltimore, yesterday I decided to take a break from the football game viewing and go for a walk- I walked by a t-shirt store and decided to go in because the designs reminded me so much of I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean. It turns out it was- the store was Squidfire- the company that Kevin Sherry and his friend started. The guy working there was one of the screen-printer's and coincidentally moved there from Boston and used to go Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston like I did for grad school. I was able to take pictures of all the underwater creatures hanging around the store and see the amazing amount of designs they create. Really fun especially considering I recently used the book as a reference for the Kinder Fish and Octopus Pictures lessons.

paper suggestions? please!

Does anyone have any suggestions for heavier white drawing paper that does not fight watercolor paint that was ordered this year?

My 60 & 80 lb.drawing/mixed-media paper really fights watercolor paint. I'm going to do another order but would love some suggestions of papers you recommend (please identify the distributor as well).

skin color crayon strategy

My students have been doing a lot of people drawing lately and I've been repeating my instructions for how to choose an appropriate crayon for the skin color. 

I made a poster of my steps since all of the grades are following the same strategy- thought I'd share it!

Fundred video resources

I am in the middle of doing the Fundred Dollar Bill Project with my fifth graders. They recently studied currency in social studies and I want to do a money design lesson with them to cross the social studies-art connection and also to round out our study of symbols. This lesson was a good bridge to my large money design lesson I'll start next week. At my new school I have access to a projector, reliable internet, AND youtube!!! So I decided to show a few videos to explain the project better, quickly, and concisely. These were the three links I ended up using and the kids found them really helpful. I debated showing a 2 minute video about lead poisoning but I couldn't find one I thought was appropriate and worthwhile enough so I just explained it a little bit more after the videos. I decided not to show Mel Chin's NAEA presentation because I thought I might lose the kids as they watched it- the Fox news cast though (who knew?) was actually very informative and showed Mel Chin.
For anyone else considering doing this project check out these videos - especially Ashby's!!

 -Ashby an audience capturing Maryland art teacher
-Fox News Cast of Paydirt/Fundred
-George Jackson Academy students