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

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.

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.

Still Life

4/5 Created a still life Glue. Pastel drawing using direct observation.  They looked at the still life of bottles and apples and drew what they saw.  They first started by watching me draw it, talking about how to draw a bottle and apple correctly.  Next they practiced small sketches 4 times on paper then one time large on the back of the paper.

They then drew their final one on black paper finishing by outlining over the pencil lines with glue.   They next week they chose the colors they wanted to use and filled in the bottles, apples and table with chalk pastels and rubbed them all over with a piece of a paper towel.   In the end we finished by spraying they paper with hair spray to fix the chalk to the paper.   They were a fun project for the kids to learn about direct observation with as well as still life's and Paul Cezanne.

Samples of what i put on the board and they steps the 4/5 students took to complete their projects, then student samples:

Luck of the Irish!

For a quick one day project I decided to pull from a project my cop. teacher did last year on Matisse.  We traced Shamrocks and cut them out the created a collage utilizing EVERY piece of paper.... we could have done this for 2- 40 min classes but i wanted to the kids to have it done and with them for St. Patrick's day and before Spring Break.  Fun project to let them think outside the box, work independently and also worked well for k-5 allowing each to be as detailed as their age allowed.  Very fun!

YEAH FOR CLAY!!

This year for clay projects we created different creatures out of pinch pot forms.   The 2nd and 3rd graders created a Clay Turtle while the 4th and 5th grade kiddos made up their own Clay Dragon.  Both of these projects we painted with Tempera Cakes and then coated in Mod Podge to give them a smooth shiny finish.  The paint simply allowed for more details to be put into the projects.

CLAY DRAGONS 4/5

CLAY TURTLES 2/3

For the lil ones we did a simple clay slab Owl by rolling folding and stamping the clay.  For these we used Glazes to finish them off with a shine.

CLAY OWLS K/1