I've done this project with the students every semester and the finished results get better every time!! We study the art of Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein and his Ben-Day dot method. The students then take a picture of themselves and trace it onto another paper to create a "cartoony" look. Then they add dots to imitate Roy's comic book style.
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Kids LOVE Clay!! 8th Grade: Tikis 8th Graders learned a little about Polynesian and Hawaiian culture, specifically why they make Tiki masks, and then made their own! I also showed the 8th Grade students how to use the potter's wheel and let any who wanted to give it a try have a go at it!! One boy in particular amazed me at how quickly he caught on, a natural! Future potter perhaps? ; ) 7th Grade Cake/Pie Boxes The 7th Grade students did a Pop Art Unit and learned about artist Wayne Thiebaud, known for his paintings of everyday object like cake and pie. Using a template the students rolled out slabs of clay and cut pieces to assemble for their cake or pie boxes. 6th Grade Double Pinch Pot Animals I let the 6th Grade basically make any animal they wanted, as long at the body was made of two pinch pots put together. They got so creative with this!! Many decided to make theirs into coin banks. 5th Grade Portrait Tiles Since I only see the 5th graders about once a week, we needed a quick clay project so the clay wouldn't dry out. So I introduced students to Pop Artist Andy Warhol, they took a picture of themselves on their laptops, rolled out a slab of clay and transferred the photo to the clay. After firing the clay, the students used bright colors like Warhol's paintings to color their face in. We had more issues with this project than I expected, so I don't know if I will do the project again. However, there were some really good finished products. (Here is the video that inspired this project): 8th Grade African Masks Students focused on art history and culture towards the end of the year. They learned about African culture and the function/purpose of masks. They needed to use xacto knives and the hot glue gun safely to put their cardboard masks together. Then they painted their masks with earth tones and could add embellishments like yarn, beads, shells, etc. 6th Grade Jungle CollagesThis seemed like a never ending project! We began by working together to paint textured blue-greens and yellow-greens to use later for the plants. Next, they learned about artist Henri Rousseau and created their own jungles with cut pieces of the painted paper. 7th Grade Pop Art Portraits Students learned about artist Roy Lichtenstein to inspire their comical portraits. They had to take a picture of themselves on their laptops and then transfer the image with graphite paper, making their lines thick and bold. Using markers or paint, students imitated Roy's ben-day dot style for a cartoon effect. 8th Grade Egyptian Metal Art First, students made their own hieroglyphics and learned about different characteristic of Ancient Egyptian art. They had to draw a face in profile view with a crown and pectoral decorations commonly worn by the ancient Pharaohs. Similar to ancient relief sculptures on stone, students had to use metal tooling techniques to make some parts of their design pop out. 7th Grade Bad Hair Day Portraits We began this drawing by learning about facial proportions in order to draw a portrait with correct measurements. It cracks me up how much it surprises students that the eyes are in the center of the head because they've always drawn them too high...or how if you get the "eye-width" right, you can line up the rest of the face. Then students filled in their hair with wacky zentangle lines and patterns. Some girls were reluctant to do this, but discovered that their portraits were much more fun and creative when they were done. :) 5th Grade Aboriginal Lizards With fields tips and snow days, one of the 5th grade sections ended up with 2 or 3 more days than the other section. So students learned a bit about the Australian Aboriginal people and their art. They drew lizards and then used earth tones to paint them. We even crumpled the paper so it would be like painting on bark. I wish we would have had at least one more day for this project, but we just ran out of time. 6th Grade Contour Line Portraits This was another quick end-of-the-year project. Students took pictures of themselves and had to trace the lines of the image onto plastic acetate with permanent marker (which is trickier than it sounds). For a background, the students made wet on wet watercolor paintings. 8th Grade Popsicle Stick Projects This was an ongoing project throughout the semester. If a student finished something early, they could keep building. There are some students that always finish super fast, while others take forever to finish a project. I have learned how important it is to have something for them to do during the in-between time. Most students just made a simple box, but there were some that worked in groups to create amazing sculptures! A group of boys that made boats and at the end of the year we filled the sink with water to see how long they would float, and determined a winner. Mandala Collaborative Project Because students at BCLUW don't have art class from August through January, the hallway displays are usually blank. So, I had each student make a small square mandala to put together for a collaborative hall display that will go up when school starts...to add some color to the halls. It looked like a quilt when finished! I am already a week into 2nd semester and am now teaching at BCLUW. I'm loving this new challenge and getting to build relationships with new students, but I will admit that I miss the familiar faces of my South Hardin Tigers. :) I thought I'd post one last update of what we did to finish 1st semester. 6th Grade: Way back in October the students made some cool "Moon Silhouettes" using chalk and sponge painted the moon. Painting black branches and a critter seemed to be quite a challenge to them, but many turned out very neat! It was fun to see the students working on their projects while wearing their Halloween costumes one day. (This is an old project, but I realized I never posted it! Whoops!) Hatchet Comic Books: I did some collaboration with the 6th grade teachers and had the students make Comic Books based on the book Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, a book they were reading for class. We spent a good chunk of time working on this project as the students learned how to make a story into visual form (illustrations for a storyboard or comic strip), how to include words/captions, and design an eye-catching cover. They did a great job filling their comic books with "scenes" from different events in Hatchet. 7th Grade: Chuck Close Self-Portraits: As the final project of their portrait and proportions unit, the students first learned about artist Chuck Close. I showed this video and we discussed 1. The challenges Chuck faced as an artist and 2. Why he paints faces. These kind of discussions are great because students get a chance to dig deeper into why art matters. Chuck has face blindness, which means he cannot recognize faces, even his own reflection! So in a way, he is trying to help himself remember faces by painting them in such detail. Fascinating stuff! To start, students looked in mirrors and we worked step by step to draw the different parts of their face in proportion. Next the students created a grid system with organic shapes (inspired by Chuck Close's work) to color it in. I thought many of these looked great when finished! A bit abstract, but each was unique. Paper Snowflakes: The classroom looked quite festive and colorful at the end of the semester. For a quick easy project, all the classes made these folded snowflakes. Very industrial studio time! I strung some up and used it as garland for the holidays. REALLY brightened up the room! 8th Grade: Paper Quilling - Students learned how to roll paper and glue it down in designs. Some did a snowflake like the example here, but many went their own route and made different "quilled" images. I even cracked open the glitter! (Which is pretty special, considering how much I hate that messy never-comes-off stuff). But the finished designs needed some extra glitz. :) Architecture Silhouettes - As another quick and easy project towards the end, I had students collage small pieces of tissue paper to look sort of like stained glass background. Then they had to find a famous building or architecture and cut the silhouette out of black paper to glue on. Can you guess what these are?: Collaborative Rainbow Paintings!:
Lastly, as a fun project to end with and something that can be left up on display for 2nd semester...the students did a collaborative project. Each student picked their own subject for their painting (approved with me, of course) but were each assigned a different color. They had to use a monochromatic color scale with ONLY this color to paint their subject. The end result was great! I was a little worried that we wouldn't finish enough on time, but when I got all of them up in the order of their colors, I was very happy with the display. I hope the students will enjoy seeing their teamwork on the wall for the next few months. :) Color Experimenting Recipe Cards: After we spent a couple days reviewing and paintings color wheels, I figured the students needed a little break to "just have fun" with paint. So I let them just experiment, time to test out any combinations of colors that they wanted. The catch was that they had to create a "recipe card" so that they could make that same color again. They had to give it a name and write down the colors they mixed to make it. Some of the names they came up with for each new color were pretty wacky! :) Magnified Leaf Paintings: Before we started this project, the students learned about the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, an American artist known for her "almost abstract" paintings of magnified objects in nature, particularly flowers and bones. Then they chose a leaf (out of a bunch I had gathered outside) and drew a couple small sketches of different close-up angles of their leaf. We used a grid system to draw one of these sketches to a larger paper and they painted in their leaves. They were strongly encouraged to look closely at the leaf for the different shades of colors and veins to add details to their paintings. They also had to paint the background the complement of their leaf color. "The Scream" Tunnel Books: The project took quite some time to finish. First we looked at Edvard Munch's artwork "The Scream" and talked about the elements/principles of design they saw in it. Plus, we touched on interpretation and what emotion they thought the artist wanted to portray. Before they made their own picture, I had the students type up a two paragraph story of a time that they were scared and screamed. This took longer than I'd planned because I didn't realize they are not as fast at typing as me. :) Whoops! Also, I had some students claiming they've never been scared or screamed before...and since it was around Halloween, I took it as an opportune time to show them this video. So if your student came home going on about how mean Ms. Holcomb is...well, they needed something to write their story about. Haha! I scare because I care. :) Next, the students drew out and colored their own Scream picture, with a self portrait of themselves screaming, in pastels. For a tunnel book, the image was separated into different pages and then assembled so that the picture looks more 3-dimensional. It took awhile to do all the measuring and to glue them together, but overall, they looked very nice when finished. Post Secret: Raising Awareness about Bullying: One week the whole school had a presentation from Mr. Brown about bullying, so I thought it would be a great time to do a project I was inspired by from the Art Conference in Cedar Rapids I went to in October. First, I showed the students a couple videos: We spent a little time discussing the sensitive issue of bullying and how to define it. I then introduced Frank Warren, an artist who did a project where he gathered "secrets" from people as post cards. The senders decorated their post cards and he put them together into books as an art form...and found that these confessions helped to Unite people. I didn't want the students to reveal a deep dark student, but told them to choose a word of phrase and decorate their small poster along that theme, similar to many of the post secrets. This is the example I showed them on the board of an idea I had and my thought/work process. Finished example on the right: Even though some students had been hounding me for a more "open ended" project, a lot of them struggled to think of ideas on their own and I found that many did something very similar to mine. ;) However, there were some awesome things that came out of this projects and I got to have some great revealing conversations with a few students and encourage them. The students were very receptive to the idea of this project and I am so proud of their work! 8th grade also did this project. Bad Hair Day Project: I initially found this idea through my mom as a quick sub plan for a day I was gone. However, it soon became one of my favorites out of the projects we've done. The 7th grade started by making hair/beards with at least 5 different line patterns. I then introduced them to facial proportions and they added the eyes, nose, and mouth. Lastly, they traced their lines with permanent markers and colored them in. The results were very silly, and incredibly creative, wild hair portraits! Too fun! Portrait Unit: Contour Line Celebrities: This was a simple three day project, but the end product was awesome! We reviewed what contour lines are and then the students used acetate plastic film over-top prints of famous people to trace the lines. It was a little challenging to trace just the important lines and not fill anything in. Next the students did a simple Wet on Wet watercolor painting as the background. When they put the line drawing on top they were stunning! I just love how they turned out! The students then cut their photocopy of the celebrity and practiced using facial proportions to draw the "Other Half." Dance Off! This is too funny not to share. I have a reward chart that looks like a treasure map...the whole class can more forward one space each day depending how well they do on following expectations. When one of my 7th grade classes got to the "X" they shocked me by insisting on having a "Dance Off" for their reward day! I figured it would be one of those things that once I got the music on, they'd all chicken out...but I decided to do it for them anyway. I was wrong, they got really into it and it was a blast. |