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.

The Leaves are Falling...

This was a project that I did with my sixth grade students, but can easily be done with any grade level.  I like to use leaves as stencils during the Fall because it helps the students understand that there are many different kinds of leaves and different shapes.  I also like the students to see, firsthand, the array of colors that leaves are this time of year.  I had the students do a simple line/shape drawing of their leaf and then mount the leaf on a variety of colors of construction paper to create a 'rippling' effect, or a repeated shape pattern.  We discussed composition in this assignment, and I had the students think about arranging their leaves in such a way that it looked like the leaves were falling from the trees.