Martin Luther King Jr. In the Style of Andy Warhol

Finger painting! To anyone who thinks that Elementary Art is all about finger painting, I give you these masterpieces.

First and second graders studied the civil rights movement in class? We used a high contrast photo of Martin Luther King Jr., projected onto large paper. Using only our fingers, we painted each portrait using two shades of paint. We looked at examples of Andy Warhol's colorful prints as our inspiration for our repeated MLK Jr. portraits. These will be displayed at Friday's civil rights assembly, led by Mr. Young's class.

The Dot by Peter Reynolds

Kindergarten artists read one of my all-time favorite art books, "The Dot," by Peter Reynolds.  The message of the book is that everyone can be an artist, you just have to believe in yourself.  In the story, the young artist starts with a simple dot on the paper and ends up with a room full of masterpieces.  You can watch a nicely done video version of this story here:

Here are our beautiful dot paintings.  

Art is an adventure!

Vermont Artist Woody Jackson: Cows!

As part of our Vermont Artist unit, Kindergarten artists studied Woody Jackson. Woody Jackson is famous for his cow paintings and prints and is the artist behind Ben and Jerry's iconic Holsteins. We looked at many of Jackson's paintings and then used watercolors, Sharpie markers and oil pastels to create cow pictures.

Drawing houses with perspective

Fifth and sixth grade artists are studying Vermont artist Sabra Field. Many of her prints have buildings in them: houses, barns, churches, etc. As artists planned their Sabra Field-inspired landscapes, I realized we needed to have some instruction around drawing houses. I found a great step-by-step video that helped to simplify the process. Although I often shy away from directed drawing instruction, I felt this worked really well and most students were satisfied with the results.

Vocabulary:
Perspective, Vanishing point, Angle, Horizon, Point of view

Check out this video for some tips on drawing houses with perspective:

Watercolor Weavings

First and second grade artists learned about warm and cool colors. We used liquid watercolor paints to paint a page in each text of colors. Then we cut one paper to make a loom and the other to make the strips. Beautiful!