Monet's Water Lilies

For the last  project of the year my K1 Kiddos played around with the starting stages of collage.  We started by watching the Movie: Monet

Then they painting a piece of 9x12 paper with different colors of blue and purple tempera cakes creating movement in overlapping to create their pond.  The next class they cut out bean shaped lily pads and used tissue paper(twisting the little square pieces on the back of their pencils) to create pretty little flowers to go on top of them.  We overlapped the two colors of green and then glued the little flowers on top and then onto the pond and they were done! Very quick and fun project for the end of they year! Great way to use up old pieces of used green paper too!

A Few Samples:

 Students were asked to have at least 2 big lily pads but if time allowed or they worked to small they could add more to their pond.

Mothers Day Flowers

I found this sweet little projects on the art blog Kids Artist this morning and had to try it out! http://kidsartists.blogspot.com/2011/02/wild-flowers.html

Changed it a little to work with what i had on hand and had the kids use different colors of Green construction paper crayon on 18x12 black paper to create the stems then using just the Tip of the brush the created the yellow center with Tempera Paint then used the same technique for the white petals.

LOVE how they are coming out and only took ONE 40min class to complete!

Thanks for the great idea Kids Artists!!!!

Japanese Cherry Blossoms

Perfect project for K-3!  The photo pretty much explain it all but the quick steps were:

1- paint the paper one color
2- Use paint wash and a straw to blow across the page from all angles to create the branches
3- add small red&pink abstract shapes to create the look of the cherry blossom on the branch

Elephant Safari

This project is an elaboration the a project i saw on Deep Space Sparkle website 

( http://www.deepspacesparkle.com/2011/01/ink-elephant-art-lesson/)  But rather than stopping at just using the ink from the marker to paint with i had the students look at foreground, middle ground and background to add in some color.  We started the same way, i gave each student a picture of an elephant and simply told them to look and draw it, i had a lot of students worried about doing this in my 2nd grade classes, but they all drew wonderful elephants.   Next they added in a large sun set and a few trees to the back ground, followed by different plants in the middle and foregrounds.  They finished by painting with tempera cakes to add a punch of color.  The students all had fun and was a perfect lesson for my 2nd and 3rd graders.

Roy Lichtenstein Cartoons

This is an old project from the start of they year i never posted.  I did this with my 5th graders but could be easily done with any grade.  We looked at cartoons in the paper for inspiration and learned all about Roy Lichtenstein and his cartoon art using benday dots.  The kids then drew their own cartoons using sharpies and the filled in using only the primary colors and flesh tones to create their cartoons.  We used q tips to create the benday dots.  Fun project but took a lot longer than i had expected.

K-1 Landscape Cows

 Foreground, Middle Ground, Back Ground-- the K-1 kiddos learned about this concept by first folding their paper in half to create a horizon line, then the drew a cow by tracing the body and head then connecting the pieces and adding the details.  They then learned that the cow was in the middle ground since its body crossed over the horizon line, they then added mountains and a sky in the background, small grass to the middle, and large blades of grass the the foreground.  Over all a very fun colorful project that they did a great job on!

^small notes on the board for them the reference while they worked to make sure they had all the parts of the cow and everything drawn in the correct grounds

 ^ We used colored crayons to draw in the details, helped to avoid showing pencil lines

 Above are two samples from Kindergarten classes and below are two from 1st graders, all did a great job making unique cows

VVG Cotton Ball and Q Tip painting and Starry Night

Found this idea on a fellow bloggers sight and had to try it out!!! My 4th and 5th graders used only cotton balls and q tips to paint Vincent Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses... the results are really neat considering what i gave them to work with.

VVG Starry Night

2nd and 3rd grade worked on VVG's Starry Night by re-drawing it using construction paper crayons.  We looked at his use of vivid brush strokes and used the crayons to try and imitate.  A fun way to learn about one of my all time favorite painting! and one that most of the students had seen or heard of before.