2011 Picture The Music

      Students have been working diligently on their Picture The Music entries for this year's contest.  We are very excited about this project, because the students were able to connect music with art - and...add in a sprinkle of culture!  That is always exciting when students can see that art expands our culture and they can see the creativity of people from all over the world.  For this competition, I have been focusing on detailed architectural drawings of Russian buildings with my older grades, but needed to simplify it for the younger artists.  I had the same PowerPoint slideshow playing on the projector so the kids could look at specific shapes, patterns, and colors in the buildings.  However, instead of drawing the shapes, I had templates of the onion domes and the triangular turrets so the students could trace them and cut them out.
      The first class, we painted each building using a variety of colors and scratched in some patterns with the end of the paintbrush.  Next class, the students used metallic markers to draw musical lines and designs into the sky.  We added color to the sky using oil pastels and blended the colors together.  We discussed how colors are directly related to feelings and the students were instructed to choose colors that match the feeling of the music.