for the love of cats (and art)

Well the Cat Portrait lesson I posted yesterday took a lovely turn. I emailed illustrator Sarah Coyne

 to let her know that we used her Cats in Clothes postcard series as inspiration for our portrait lesson. She replied with a very dear email and a post on her own blog which concluded with art education advocacy. 

So proud of my first graders!

"Cat"tastic Portraits with Personality

My first grade students have been working with the concept of portraits quite a bit this year. 

I came across a set of postcards by a local artist this winter when I was at the BizarreBazaar:

Sarah Coyne of Egg-a-Go-Go

"Cats in Clothes" series

I loved the cats with personalities of people and it reminded me that I inherited this book from a former teacher, "Impressionist Cats" by Susan Herbert:

The kids got a kick out of the cat portraits and impressionists impressions. More importantly though, they were great examples of how portraits can show a close up of a person, a whole body, emotion, clothing, occupation, etc.!

We approached our lesson like the postcards were composed- with an oval shaped 'frame' to draw our cat portrait within and a 'wall paper' background. My goal was to have each student have a closer up portrait and also a whole body portrait- due to severe sickness traveling throughout our student body there are many who only came out with one finished piece- but I still have piles of them and they are hilarious (and genius)!

Cats, Cats, Cats!

I have two versions of ways you can go about this project.
The cats also work on their own- the kids love to play with them and take them home after they cut them out and draw details them on them even if you don't have time to make a background for them.

First have the students only draw the outline of the cat: 

the body, head, ears, tail, legs

then I give them yellow and red tempera to mix into orange

(they can also use the back end of the brush to draw designs into the paint)

After they dry students outline them in black marker, add face details, and patterns.

Then cut them out!

One version I did was using shadows. They traced their cut out cats on black paper and made a shadow for their new friend. 

I recently did a new version.

I cut up old book pages and newspaper. 

The students glued them down to white paper to create a brick wall.

Then they painted over the collage with reds and browns to create brick.