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

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!

Kandinsky One-offs...

So we had a little extra time in several of my elementary school classes. I wanted them to do something still related to Kandinsky, since that's who we had been studying, so I showed them his Color Study Squares: Concentric Circles:

They loved this painting... Its so colorful! I also got to teach them a new vocabulary word, we figured out by studying the painting what the word "concentric" means.

Here are some of the beautiful color studies they did:

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Our first elementary art project of the year was inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night painting:

This is one of my all time favorite works of art, even if it is "overplayed".

I taught the kids about Van Gogh's life and style of using lines to form shapes and using color to express emotion. Then I gave them blue construction paper and oil pastels to draw the sky using Van Gogh's style. Then they got black construction paper to cut out shapes for objects in the landscape that they colored with oil pastels and glued onto their picture.  There were so many great ones, here are a few: