Paul Klee Inspired Cities

The 6th grade recently completed a city scape painting in the style of the artist Paul Klee. Pictured above is his painting, Kingdom and the Sun. The students observed his painting and had a gallery discussion about how he used geometric shapes and learned that his work was classified as cubism.

To create their own Kingdom and the Sun, my students created a pre planning paper.  On this paper the students wrote a few guided notes about Paul Klee and his life and they also did a presketch of their painting. The students were also challenged to choose a color theme and stick to it for their painting. This proves that the students really do understand the difference between warm and cool color families as well as what the primary and secondary colors are.

Next, the students drew, in pencil, the outline of their city, using geometric shapes, on a piece of recycled book paper. Then, the students painted very carefully the buildings they drew. Lastly, the students traced over their pencil lines with a black marker to create bolds outlines.

Negative Silhouettes

The students in 6th grade have been practicing their painting skills for over a month now and I feel that their efforts are really shinning! For this project, the students learned about negative silhouettes. They played games to identify silhouettes and created their own negative space silhouette by cutting out a magazine image, tracing around it, and then painting in a color field around the image. The students were instructed to choose warm or cool colors to complete their projects, and they did a fantastic job doing just that.

American Gothic.

This week the students in my digital art class and going to be studying Grant Wood and his painting American Gothic.

The students are going to use pixlr.com in order to recreate the painting into an interersting or silly spoof. I can not wait to see the results!

Contour Line Portraits

My 7th grade digital art class has been working on creating contour line self portraits this week. It has been difficult to find free software for the students to use, as my school does not have any Adobe programs, but I did find a pretty great site called pixlr. In pixlr you can accomplish a lot of the same processes that you might use in Photoshop.

The students and I learned about cropping, rotating, color changing, and focal blurs last week. This week I had them focus on taking a self portrait, adding a layer, and drawing on that layer with the sketch tool in order to create a contour line portrait. The results are pretty great!

This project came out so great because my students had computer mice to use thanks to a grant for my art room. In the beginning of the year I wrote a Donor's Choose grant and asked for a class set of computer mice. Friends, family and strangers all donoated to the cause and now my students can create awesome, inspiring artwork with the right tools!