Fantastic Apples

After exploring realistic color with colored pencils, I wanted to give my high school artists a chance to get a little more creative. I printed out black and white images of apples and had them draw them in color. They were allowed to make the apples any colors they wanted. Here are the first three finished ones:

Colored Pencil Veggies and Pooh

My high school students started working with color this semester, or more exactly, colored pencils. We started off making a color wheel to understand a little color theory. Then they got to work using their drawing skills to draw a bell pepper. These are some really nice ones:

Modigliani Inspired Self Portraits

My middle school students worked hard on their oral presentations right before finals, so I wanted to give them art project that was engaging and fun, but also not "super challenge" as my 5-year-old would say. We looked at portraits by Modigliani and found that his style had particular traits: necks are elongated, faces are oval, eyes are almond-shaped, and noses are sometimes twisted. We used Photo Booth on my Mac to take a picture of each student which I then printed out in black and white. Students used these pictures for reference and crossed them with Modigliani's style for their final projects. They had a great time using oil pastel and exaggerating their features!

Aram

Danila

Watts Towers Field Trip - A Great Time For All!

A view of the base of the towers and decorative surrounding wall.

In November we took the 3-5 graders to see the Watts Towers. This was one of my favorite field trip destinations when I was in elementary - I think we went every year or so it seems. Since then things have gotten even better. They have added on an art gallery and a teaching studio. The tour includes a video about the artist who built them by hand, Simon Rodia, a tour of the towers, a tour of the gallery, and an art activity let by a highly qualified art educator. We had 35 kids and I was impressed at how he held their attention as he modeled each step of the printmaking process they were going to do.

On the tour.

Educator taking questions from our curious students.

Work in progress.

After the print the students wait patiently.

Here are some of the wonderful finished prints by our students:

Our art board at school.

Middle School Surrealist "Handscapes"

For this project I showed my students videos about Dalí. They learned how he was influenced by his dreams and subconscious. They learned that many of the anthropomorphic forms in his paintings that resemble large rocks are based on rocks he actually saw in the landscape where he spent much of his childhood.

For the assignment they used their hands in a similar way that Dalí used the rocks - they drew them and then changed them into something else while still allowing them to be hand like.

Here are the terrific results:

Our board!

Afrem

Aram

Danila

Expressionist Pastel Drawings Have Feeling

Inspired by a fellow art instructor here at Ribét - thank you Mr. Impert! - I taught a mini-lesson on Expressionism to my high school art class. We looked at Van Gogh, Munch, Pollock, and other Expressionists to see how the line quality, color, and feeling differed from more constrained and realistic paintings. Then the students chose from magazine images and were instructed to make an expressionistic drawing inspired by the photo. Here are some of the amazing results:

Directed Drawing Turkeys!

I really never do directed drawing lessons, but we were done with our unit and I didn't want to start anything new before the thanksgiving holiday week, so I looked up some turkey drawing lessons and found this one to do with my first graders. They drew directly with Sharpies so that they couldn't erase or have to retrace their lines then used oil pastels to color them in. They loved it and their drawings came out so great! Thanks to Art Projects for Kids for posting!