Line Prints

 

In this Line Prints lesson, second graders used two forms of media, styrofoam printmaking and craypas, to create a beautiful multi-media piece. We are using learning targets in art his year. A learning target is a statement is a "I can" statement telling students what they will be learning during their art lesson. The learning target for this lesson was "I can use a variety of media to create lines." Line is one of the seven elements of art. A wonderful artist, Walter Anderson, had a philosophy that if a person knew how to draw seven basic lines (straight, curved, zig-zag, wavy, spiral, dotted and dash) they could draw anything. To practice creating lines, students were asked to draw the seven lines on a piece of styrofoam. They were encouraged to experiment with repetition a varying the lines. 

After they had incised the styrofoam plates, we printed! Students enjoyed using the brayers and ink to ink to prepare the plates and printing them. Once they were dry, the lines of the print were extended to the edge of the page and filled in with craypas. The results were gorgeous!

This lesson was inspired by an image seen on the art educational site Artsonia.

One Fish, Two Fish

March 2 is Theodore Geisel Suess, aka Dr. Suess', birthday! To celebrate second grade listened to the story One Fish, Two Fish. While looking at the illustrations students noticed that he used black outlines in his illustrations and some of his fish swam like regular fish, while some were standing. His fish were also a variety of colors. They began their project by drawing the fish as big as possible on their paper with black crayon, including details. Bright tempera paint colors were used to paint the fish. When it dried, they outlined their crayon lines with black craypas and cut out their fish. Their backgrounds were made my cutting a variety of lines from red construction paper. The red and white pattern is a reflection of Dr. Suess' most famous book, The Cat in the Hat. The results were a beautiful and a great tribute to Dr. Suess.

The idea for the this project was found at Deep Space Sparkle.

100 Hearts!

The 100th day of school and Valentine's Day are the same day this year! In honor of these two great days coinciding first and second graders tried drawing 100 hearts.  I taught them a heart drawing trick-"draw a 3 and then a V" (see below).  We talked about strategies of fitting all of those hearts on one paper-overlapping, changing size, and drawing partial hearts to activate the edges of the paper. After students drew the hearts they had a choice of coloring solid colors or using the texture rubbing plates we have in the art room to add interest.

Winter Wonderland

I wish the world outside the windows of PES looked like this!  The rain is turning the pretty white snow into grayish-brown slush!  It's a good thing the second graders created these beautiful winter landscape!
Students learned the different "tricks" artists use to create depth in their artwork.  These tricks help landscapes look like you can walk right into them.  When they created their landscape there were asked to make colors bright to dark by mixing shades of gray, use overlapping and to make changes in size to show depth.  Although most of their work was made with tempera paint, craypas (oil pastels) were used for adding pops of color and detail.