Value Painting Meets Zentangle Drawing

I taught the 6th graders how to make a tint of a color by starting with white paint and adding just a tiny bit of another color to create a new color. This is called a tint. The tints are then made darker and darker to create lot of value of the same color. The students practiced this on their own, using old plastic lids are their paint pallettes. They did a fanstastic job making tints and values of their one color.

With their one color, the students painting in a background to a flower drawing. Each student had 1/4 of the flower on their paper and their table partners had the other 3/4s. So that when each students has completed their paper and places them with their table partners, an entire whole flower is created.

After painting the background and sketching out their 1/4 of a flower, the students were taught how to draw in the zentangle style. We watched a video to get us inspired. Afterwards classical music was played and the students really, really got in to their zentangle styles. The students were completely silent and really enjoying the concept of "zenning out" to the music and enjoying how to make repeated lines and patterns. Next, the students began to zentangle draw on their flower petals with fine tipped sharpie pens. The results have been not only beautiful but also inspiring to me!

I am looking forward to them being displayed together in the hallway for the arrival of spring!

7th Grade Nature Words

The 7th grade has been working on a three day project discovering the benefits of good graphic design. We talked about needed to ship a package over night to our cousin in another state. As we were looking for companies to use we found one with a snail as their logo. I asked the students if they thought this was a good choice for an over night shipping company. They all agreed that the use of a snail icon was not the best choice. They all responded with cries of "No!! It should be a cheetah or a bird!" Which, I completely agreed.

Using the knowledge of understanding that images help our graphic design art work, we create words from nature that displayed characteristics of that word. An exanple would be the word ICE and the letters forming icicles and colored in with blues. The kids really did a fantastic job designing their words.

Busy, busy, busy!

Oh my goodness, the last two months has been very busy for the students in Art Room 101 at Jefferson Academy. On the night before our last day of school before winter break, Jefferson Academy held its 2nd Annual Music and Arts Festival.

The students and I set up two hands on art activities in the hallway, including an "I Wish" tree where parents and students could write the 2013 Wish. We had a wonderful evening listening to the middle school band perform and viewing art work from both the 6th and 7th grade students.

Here I am with one of my students who added a very sweet wish to the "I Wish" 2013 tree.

I hope that all of the students and staff have a wonderful and restful winter break!

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!