Did you join the Artsy Book Club on Facebook? It was started by Cassie Stephens. You should come join us! We are starting to work through the book One Drawing A Day: A 6-Week Course Exploring Creativity with Illustration and Mixed Media. The first assignment was a pen drawing of a still life set up of stuff you find around you. Drawing immediately with pen is harder than it seems. I was so worried about drawing a line wrong … Read more…
The week after winter break was up in the air. Due to construction, we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to use our art room and we didn’t know if we would have easy access to supplies. I planned for most of my classes to complete observational drawings during that week period, since they all could use the same supplies and learning to observe the edges and shapes of objects is great training for the eye. It … Read more…
This is a great project to try at the beginning of the year or as your students are reviewing the alphabet and beginning to learn to write words and phrases. I got this idea from the book Dynamic Art Projects for Children. Ours are not exactly as the ones in this book, but very similar. We started by looking at the art of Stuart Davis and reading the phrases, words and numbers that we saw in his artwork. The … Read more…
Here are two templates to use for postage stamps: one full stamp or a sheet of nine. You could also just draw them in boxes and then cut them out with those craft scissors that have the funky edges. My 4th/5th grade class designed their own postage stamps. I brought in a box of stamps for them to look through and see up close. I also showed them a short Powerpoint about stamps throughout history. There is information on the … Read more…
My Kindergarten students learned about types of lines. They used oil pastels to draw a variety of line types and then painted over them with watercolor paints. We are going to turn these into windsocks! Stay tuned to see how we transform their paintings.
Here is an easy Starry Night inspired project that I like to teach to my kindergarten art classes. There is a great Van Gogh book for kids called “Getting to Know the Greatest Artists”, by Mike Venezia (my favorite series of art books for kids.) After viewing the swirling lines, dots and dashes that Van Gogh used, the students create a wild and swirly night sky scene with markers. A silhouettte landscape or city scene is added on the bottom … Read more…
This oil pastel drawing project is inspired by the artwork of Paul Gauguin, in particular his painting Tahitian Landscape. To build up a little enthusiasm, when the kids arrived to class there was an envelope at their seat. I told them to open the envelope and see what was inside. I had printed off pictures of Tahitian Landscape, laminated them and then cut them into puzzle pieces. The kids worked quickly to put together the puzzles. Then, I introduced the … Read more…
