Last of the pastel plants

Sometimes great art takes a little longer than planned.  A few final pastel plant drawings.  Check out the detail on the last one (yes, that was done by a 5th grader!!)

Overheard in art elective...

Today I celebrated my birthday with my art elective class, complete with party hats and snacks.  At one point I heard one of my favorite students exclaim: "Today is the best day of my LIFE!!!!!"  It certainly made my birthday even brighter!

Art Love!

Plant Pastels

Here are some of my students' completed pastel drawings based on close up sections of plants. During the course of this assignment, we talk about how we are taking something real (a photo of a flower) and abstracting it by taking a close look at one section.  I think they are beautiful.  The artists range in age from 5-7th grade.

Clay Creatures

Students are working on some cool clay creatures.  There are a variety of insects as well as some imaginary creatures.  Here are some of our creatures as works in progress with our picture and sketches.

Camouflage

We are in the midst of a camouflage project, do you see the hidden lightning bug above? We started by creating clay creatures.  Next we isolated 5 shapes we found in our creature (both/either organic and geometric) and 4 colors we could use to camouflage it and to create our own original "camo" patterns.  It was a little bit of a rough start but hopefully we will have some good results soon!

Step by step

The 7th grade pinch pots are turning out nicely.  They are not all finished and ready to post yet but here are some photos with a step by step showing how we arrived at our final product.

First we watched 2 youtube videos: one on how to make a pinch pot and the other on how to add features to the pot.  Then we began rolling our clay into round shapes.

Next we squeezed (pinched!) the sides of the pot to make them thinner and more even.

We smoothed out any rough edges using sponges or fingers dipped in water.

We added funny facial features.

 

And used a toothpick to carve in extra details.

 

Once they were formed we compared them to our original sketches, and were generally impressed.

 After drying overnight, we painted them using acrylic paint.

And added small details.

Lastly we celebrated our lovely creations!!

Next week, we will be using potting soil and marigold seeds to plant the "hair."  More photos as we finish.

Photo Follow Up

 Some of my best lessons are ones that are hard to document because they are discussions we have in class.  To follow up on the macro photography assignment, we did a discussion based reflection and a positive peer critique (because by the end of the year, we NEED some positivity!!).

For the reflection, I printed one picture by each student, labelled them on the back with the name of the student, and hung them up on the board using numbers to identify them.  We then discussed what a macro photo is and chose which photo best showed the qualities of a macro photo.  We chose the best example by placing post-it notes on the board next to the number of the photo.  While I asked the students to not be influenced by peer pressure, my 7th graders almost unanimously chose the same photo.  Interestingly, it turned out to be a photo by a quieter student who does not have many close friends in the classroom.  It was really cool to see all the students rally around him when they realized it was his photo.  5th grade all chose different photos which lead to the conclusion that it was difficult to choose just one examples because we had demonstrated mastery of macro photography.

After the discussion, we gave positive peer feedback.  Without revealing the artist behind the photo, the students had to write on a notecard "I like photo # __ because ______" and give a well thought out reason.  Interestingly, while 7th graders mostly complimented the one they chose as being the best example of macro photography, the 5th graders each ended up choosing a different photo so that each photo received some positive feedback.  It was great to see the smiles on their faces when they read their compliments!

Camouflaged clay creatures

My 5th and 6th graders are working on creating camouflaged clay creatures.  The first step is to sketch a creature that can camouflage, step 2 is to sculpt it, and step 3 is photographing it in a camouflaging environment!  If the rest of the projects are as good as the sketches, I think these will be awesome!

Pinch Pot Faces

My Wednesday elective created pinch pot faces last week!  This week we are planting "hair" to complete the look.  I liked the results so much, my 7th grade classes are starting the project this week.  

Preparatory sketches

I've done Georgia O'Keeffe inspired flowers before, but this time around I had my students do a couple preparatory sketches. First they selected a plant photo (they could also use their own macro photo for their drawing) and drew it in their sketchbook.  Next they took a viewfinder and "zoomed in" on one section of the flower picture (just like using a camera viewfinder) and recreated it on the formal sketching sheet.  They completed 2 rough pencil sketches and then one final sketch before starting their final drafts.  Here are some photos of our process.

Collections

On Friday, I took my 5th graders out to gather a few interesting objects for a collection.  We headed out to Ft Slocum and found all kinds of interesting objects to collect in our paper bags. I brought a camera so we could photograph interesting objects that were too big to take into our classrooms.  Below are the things we found! On Tuesday we will sort and analyze our collections, as a museum curator would do, and then use them for two different projects- a solargraph and a clay project about camouflage.  I was very impressed with their inquisitiveness and also their careful observations.