Middle school self-portraits with style

Self-portraits!

These were done by my sixth graders. 

I wanted to squeeze in portraits but I was in a time crunch

so I went for a graphic design, limited color palette approach. 

Their practice drawings included shading but not the final products. 

I gave the students the option to do sunglasses in lieu of eyes but surprisingly only a few of them took me up on my offer. 

The backgrounds were inspired by Beatriz Milhazes. 

The kids were limited to sharpie, fat black marker, grey marker, and one color. 

After this project we dove into a unit focused on the principles of design, so this was a great segue from the last unit focused on realistic drawing into the new one. 

gumball machines - circles & ovals

I realized that my kinder students were having trouble drawing circles and ovals that were distinguishable from each other and that my first graders drew them so fast they couldn't tell the difference either. 

We did these gumball machines to try to drive in the difference between the two shapes. 

The frames had a circle-oval border. 

The gumball machines were supposed to have all circle gumballs inside. 

As simple a project it was the kids really enjoyed making these!

Peacocks!

I will write another post about both my art night event and the Power of Art program- but in the mean time here is my newly completed first grade peacock lesson.

 The head and body crop was cut out of blue tag board, 

then we glued on wood pieces to start our patterns.

 

 Our beautiful peacock color palette:

Recycled Paper Kente Cloth

We are working on our follow up weaving lesson. 

I just had to share a few peeks because they are so pretty and cheerful. 

We have been learning about Kente Cloth, and I happened to have studied abroad in Ghana so I have a couple cloths. We made strips of Kente Cloth using paper that we first painted patterns with tempera cakes. 

Then wove both ends using newspaper we had painted with tempera paint and I cut into strips.  

We "don't do holidays" at my school so this was a great and meaningful way for me to get some hearts and pink into the mix this week. I'm going to roll them up with a string and send them home on Monday.

 

Today I tested out the TP roll-->heart stamper trick and it worked great!

More info and pictures of the steps to come later tonight and tomorrow.

 If you teach about Kente Cloth this book is my favorite

and the information, names, places, are all very accurate.

I highly recommend it and the kids love the story!

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.