Art

Happy holidays! I can’t believe it’s almost a new year! I’ve been enjoying this rain filled winter break and was reflecting on how sweet this school year has been thus far, so I decided to blog about it.

November

We started this month with an introduction to color. We reviewed the basics like primary, cool and warm colors, the rainbow sequence but also got into creating their own color wheels, monochromatic, as well as complementary colors. Our first art project was a multi media piece of an Autumn forest. After watercoloring the background with cool colors for sky and earth, the students used acrylic paints in warm colors to create the treetops. Painting techniques such as dabbing paint to blend on canvas, versus brush strokes, which we used for background, were applied. The students had the choice in using colored pencils or oil pastels for the tree trunks and for adding details throughout.

Before Thanksgiving break, the students enjoyed creating collage art with recycled, painted paper. (*Painted paper is created throughout the year using leftover paint on painting days. The students help by freely painting over blank paper in this collective prep work to be used for future projects. I mean, why throw away perfectly good paint?) They made really incredible gratitude birds by cutting out shapes and parts needed to design their bird from the painted paper that comes in many blended colors. The challenge was to have the colors they chose for their birds wings, body, tail, etc., contrast by using both cool and warm tones. I also had them add an affirmation by looking through a few magazines to find a word that resonated with them.

December

This class added a lot of artwork and technique work in their art journals lately. In between projects the students like to do their ABC’s Art. From time to time, I’ll have the students divide a page in their art journal with a heading of the letters of the day. In each section they would draw one or many things that begin with that letter. I believe we are at ‘L’.
Something else we got to cover was an introduction to value and shading. We practiced with crosshatching, hatching, dots and color. That led into our monochromatic art project of a painted mountains range. All students were given their own palette to blend blue with only white or black tempera paints to add the layers of mountains in the foreground, mid ground and background. The students enjoyed adding a border to their artwork by creating a border with masking tape before they paint, only to peel off carefully once paint was dried. Whenever we are working on a performance with Rock, the art room becomes a part of the theatre production. In result, we have impromptu art classes in the Tile room. This is when we get really creative with the materials and supplies I can carry down! The students took a class period to help create the covers for their fabulous winter play also more work in their art journals. I created a “December worksheet” where we do drawings of abstract evergreen trees, cute penguins, a winter gnome and their own expression of snowflakes.
We found time to practice some more value with a drawing of a snow(wo)man using white chalk on dark blue construction paper. They practice determining where there light source is coming from and added more chalk to that highlighted areas of their snow people.
After the performance we were back in the art room to have only enough time to squeeze in one last winter project before winter break! It was a simple project, really small in size, with beautiful results. It was perfect for the limited time we had. This project is titled, ‘Peace on Earth’ in my art journal. The painted paper was stillout from before so we used a strip of light blue construction paper as the canvas and cut up pieces of painted paper (in light, cool hues) to glue down as heaps of snow. With pencil and microns, the kids only added branches coming out of the sides of the canvas, to give the sense of where the tree is, by using their imaginations and to “see/imagine” where the tree limbs grow from. We had time to add another medium and used both ends of a bamboo skewer to dip in white paint to add falling snow with a bit of pointillism. With red painted paper they drew and cut out little cardinals to perch on their snow covered branch. These turned out beautifully.
I hope everyone is having a beautiful and safe winter break. I look forward to the new year and creating with the kids again. Thank you for reading!