Fork Printing Tulips

What a great project for spring! My kids loved this! We first drew the background and colored it with crayons. Next, we painted the stems and leaves. Then, we used forks to stamp the tulips on each stem. It's the time of year for fluorescent paint!!! I usually save the "fun" supplies for the end of the year when kids need a little more motivation and excitement in the school day. Lol. Here are some kindergarten samples:

Stamping with homemade paintbrushes

This project was a lot of fun!  I decided to go out on a limb and try something new for our St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Picture the Music Art Competition.  First, we all listened to a musical composition and brainstormed some colors, shapes, and lines that would go well with the music.  The students used oil pastels to create an abstract work of art that best represented the music.  Next, for some added interest to their drawings, we made our own paintbrushes/stamps using pipe cleaners.  Each student got 5 pipe cleaners, twisted them together, and spread out the bottom ends to create a 'star' shape.  Students then used their new 'paintbrush' to stamp colorful shapes on top of their drawings.  This was  a lot of fun and gave the students the chance to think 'outside of the box' or 'outside of the painting' for once!

Monoprints!

     My 6th graders this year are FABULOUS!  So, I am excited about doing fun, experimental art projects with them this year.  This project is one that I came up with using foil wrapped around a cardboard circle and using it to make monoprints.  Each table had two colors of paint on it and 4 paint brushes.  Students rotated to each table every 5-7 minutes so they could experiment mixing the different colors and making a different monoprint at each station.  Here are the students mixing colors and adding the paint to the foil surface:

Here are some finished monoprints:

And here are some finished prints with some colored pencil line drawings and patterns added:

Cross-Curricular

      If you are like me, you are always looking for ways to connect art to the common core standards.  Yes, we do this indirectly with almost any lesson we teach.  But, how can we teach directly to implement the skills and strategies that our students NEED to know in an art lesson?  One way is through writing.  Our school has focus words that will prepare our students for the standardized test in the Spring.  This month, we are focusing on Summarizing.  So, I decided to have the students summarize the life and work of Andy Warhol.  First, we watched this fabulous video about Andy Warhol from the creators of "Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists."

(This is a short preview of the video from You Tube.  I have the full version on DVD.)

      Next, the students wrote a summary about the life and work of Andy Warhol.  I gave them ideas such as, who was he, what did he do, what kind of art did he make, and so on.

Their summaries were pretty interesting!

Here's a good one:

Here is how I displayed the writing and the artwork together:

      For the art portion of the lesson, we created flower prints using tissue paper and water.  I had the students cut out the flower shape, trace it on the paper, moisten the flower shape on the paper, and then lay the tissue paper flower onto the wet paper.  They were amazed how the color can transfer from the flower to the paper just using water!  For the background, we used pieces of tagboard dipped in black, yellow, & green paint to stamp the texture around the flower shapes.  Here is the inspiration artwork by Andy Warhol that we looked at before we began our artwork:

Yarn Block Painting

In Art Club today, students made stamps out of blocks of Balsa wood and yarn.  We wrapped the wood block in a long piece of yarn, taped it down, and stamped it into the paint and on our paper.  Yes, it was a bit noisy, but I think they enjoyed it and their paintings express the high amounts of energy in a room full of 7 year-olds!

 Brooke's Artwork

 Emory's Artwork

 Isaiah's Artwork

Wood Block Stamp

Kindergarten Art Club

We started Art Club off with a splash last night :)  (literally!)  It was great, though.  I love the concept of apple printing, but wanted to spice-up my usual lesson using the colors of apples.  Since Kg. classes have read the book Mouse Paint, I decided to go with the concept of color mixing while printing.  It was great because the colors mixed on their own as the kids dipped the apples and printed them.  Can you see what's missing, though? 

Yep, the Art teacher - genius that I am - forgot the row of yellow!!  Ooops!

Deep Blue Sea Mural - Day 2

I thought my 6th graders would enjoy creating some 3-D jellyfish for our underwater mural project.  I actually got this idea from http://onecrayolashort.blogspot.com/.  I always love to make paper mache projects with balloons!  Well, let's just say, I love the results, but maybe not so much the actual "making" part of the project :)  I allowed the students to use multi-colored tissue paper, to give a little contrast between each jellyfish.  I think the pink jellyfish from One Crayola Short looked great, but I like to give students a choice of colors for their projects.  These will be the tops of our jellyfish once they dry...

 

Third graders worked on creating schools of fish using styrofoam stamps.  I instructed them to draw their own fish on their piece of styrofoam, cut it out, and use 1-2 colors of tempera paint to stamp their fish repeatedly on their paper.