Matisse Gold Fish

This idea came from the Blog BlueMoon Palette (project here: http://bluemoonpalette.blogspot.com/search/label/goldfish)  and i loved it!!! It can be done quickly as a final week project like i am doing or made more elaborate and last for a few weeks! Over all my students have done a great job doing this project mostly independently.  I have been working on drawing with them an soon hope that they no longer feel they need steps to draw or to follow along with me as i draw and can just see something and draw it, but that takes time so for this one i did a simple step by step on the board and told them to draw!  We also talked about foreshortening and negative space with this project and so far students from grades 1-4 have done a SUPER job!

Georgia's Flowers

Georgia's Flowers!

Simple project that has been done with many on Georgia O'Keeffe,  I had my 4/5th grade students used direct observation by looking at artificial flowers and drawing the  flower so that it touched at least 2 sides, hopefully 4 sides of their paper and then outlined it with sharpie and painted them with water colors, the photos explain more... simple project that has beautiful results!! 

My notes for them on how the flowers should/could look after they draw them, and how to crop their practice sketch down so that the flower touched all the sides. 

Below are the starting steps on drawing the flower, they picked a fake flower and used direct observation to draw it....

Then they went over ALL pencil lines with Sharpie...

Then they painted with watercolors, using different intensities of the color to show depth, they finished by choosing on contrasting color to paint the background to make their flower POP!

One Day Owls

K-1 One Day Owls

As a quick filler project my k-1 students learned how to draw this fun lil owl.  We went step by step drawing together just with crayon (to avoid eraser worries) and then the students used watercolors to paint them in.

This owl was with one of my last classes when we  decided to call them Opposite Owls, learning about color opposites, this was a fun way to get a little color theory into the lesson, in the future i will probably do them all this way, just to avoid so many plain brown owls.