Rosy Hearts

 

Pablo Picasso had many different art styles during his career.  Art historians have given names to these periods of art in his life.  Fourth grade has been studying Picasso's Blue Period and Rose Period.  The Rose Period was after Mr. Picasso's Blue Period.  During his Blue Period he was depressed, poor and unsettled. Then, as he became successful his attitude became more positive and he began using brighter colors and depicting happier images.  And, he fell in love! As you can see from the hearts, this lesson is inspired by Mr. Picasso's Rose Period. Students were given red, magenta, white and black paint and asked to create a large heart painted in tints and shades of red. I believe this hearts would cheer anyone's day!

This lesson was completely swiped from the awesome art teacher blog Painted Paper.

Cubist Portraits

 Fifth graders studied Pablo Picasso's Cubist portraits.  To create his portraits, Mr. Picasso took two different views of a face and combined them into one image.  Fifth graders created three portrait collages by combining a front view of a face and a profile.  They also learned about complimentary colors, which are across from each other on the color wheel.  Each pair of complimentary colors has one primary and one secondary color.  Facial features we added using scraps of paper and details were done with black tempera paint. The results were colorful and imaginative!

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.

Polar Bear, Polar Bear...

 

Sometimes people think artists need fancy materials to create art, but artists can use a variety of materials to paint with.  First graders used white tempera paint, cardboard pieces, Q-Tips and sponges to create a painting of a polar bear. The first graders are studying polar bears in their classroom, so they knew a lot about them.

The cardboard pieces and Q-tips were used to print snowflakes in the background and a piece of kitchen sponge was used to sponge paint the polar bear.  First graders tried to create a shadow under the chin of their polar bear by stamping black paint into the white.  Paintbrushes were used for the darling faces. 

Mrs. Polizotto got the idea for this project at http://kidsartists.blogspot.com/

Ornament Collages

Part of being an artist is practicing the skills needed to create a variety of art.  Third and fourth graders exercised their cutting skills by creating a paper collage that was turned into an ornament.  The project started by learning how to make a circle using a compass.  Students then chose a variety of cut paper lines (some thin, some thick) to make a collage on their circle.  Students were asked to use at least 10 lines in their collage and five had to be changed in some way by cutting.  After the glue dried, we got out our new metallic craypas (oil pastel) to add glitz and glamor to our collages.  Aren't they gorgeous???

Snowflakes falling...

Where is the snow??  It's almost Christmas!  Kindergarten used white paint and sponge brushes to create snow on their collage.  The collage was made by cutting squares diagonally to create triangles for trees and rooftops.  Scraps were used to add chimneys, doors and windows.

Walk this Way-Warm/Cool Collages

Fifth graders learned to differentiate warm colors from cool colors.  To see the impact of warm colors vs. cool colors the students drew one image and copied it to another paper.  One drawing was colored with warm colors, the other cool colors.  When both drawings were completed, we sliced them into 1 inch strips.  Students then folded a 18X6 oak tag paper into an accordion fold.  The pieces of the drawing were glued down in a pattern: warm, cool, warm, cool onto the paper accordion.  Our finished artwork will become an optical illusion.  Walking towards the artwork you will see one image and walking back by you will see a different one.  Here are some pictures of the work in progress.  We are almost finished!