Sixth Grade Self-Portraits

Sixth graders are finishing up their self-portraits this week and I'm really proud of their progress.  Our focus has been on proportion, placement, and value in drawing realistic portraits.  We did a lot of work in our sketchbooks where we created a value scale, and practiced drawing individual facial features.  The final project was to create a realistic self-portrait using what we had learned.  To create these, students began by toning the paper lightly with their pencil.  They worked from a similar size black and white photo.  To help with placement students folded their photo two ways and drew corresponding lines on their paper dividing it into four blocks.  Working with one feature at a time students found they could use the center point as a handy reference for placing things correctly on the page.  The lines were erased out as the went along.
Nice job sixth grade.  

Painted Elephant Printmaking Project

Elephants play an important role in Indian culture and are painted and beautifully decorated for Festivals and Celebrations in India.  Third graders looked at examples of painted elephants and hosted an elephant celebration of their own.

Want to thank Laura over at Painted Paper for this idea.  I adapted it by including some flower stamping.  We also used toned chalk pastel paper in place of painted paper.

These elephants were made with a template.  You can draw your own or find a drawing tutorial here.
Feel free to contact me if you would like a copy of my template.  So here's another version of painted Indian Elephants.

To make the elephant...

Use foam stickers to make your elephant pattern stamp.

Tone  a piece of paper by chalking lightly with the side of your chalk pastels.  We used pinks, blues and grays for our paper.  Blend with a tissue.

Next stamp your toned paper with your elephant pattern stamp.  Use any method you like to stamp.    

We inked the stamps with a brayer.  We placed the stamp on our elephant paper.  We rolled our stamp using a cover sheet and a clean brayer to cover our paper with  a stamped-out  design.
    

Trace or draw an elephant on the back of your paper and cut it out.  Save the scraps to make an ear and a tusk.

Give your elephant a fancy blanket using patterned papers, fabric, scraps, ribbon, sequins, and glue.
Use chalks and paints and a small brush to add details.



Embellish with gold paint.

More Inspired by Grandma Moses

With repeating house shapes, this artist leads the viewers eye up the path and into the space she created in her painting. 

More work-in-progress landscapes inspired by Grandma Moses.  The first two are Currier sixth grade examples.We're really working the watercolors.  This artist's work demonstrates careful planning in the sequence in which she applied her paints. Working slowly and with a plan is key to avoiding color bleeds. 

With repeating house shapes, this artist leads the viewers eye up the path and into the space she created in her painting.

Rhythm and movement are created by combining flowing lines and repeating sets of shapes in this fourth grade artist's landscape.

Kids will be putting the finishing touches on these this week.  Nice job Currier!

Gyotaku the Japanese Art of Fish Printing

Gyotaku is the second project in the third and forth grade printmaking unit.
In Japanese, "Gyo" means fish and "Taku" means rubbing. Put it together and you get fish print. Fish printing was invented by Japanese fisherman before the invention of cameras. Fisherman wanted a way to keep an especially large or interesting catch, and yet still be able to take the fish to market to sell. They found that by painting the fish with ink and pressing it against paper they could take a print of their fish, then rinse off the ink and sell the fish at market. Fish prints were brought back and displayed in homes of fisherman either on the walls or in journals.
Fish printing later developed into an art form when artists began adding artistic elements and created prints for their beauty. This fish print was created by a fourth grade art student.

Instead of using live fish (for obvious reasons) we used a set of rubber fish stamps. I set up 4-6 printmaking stations in the room and students circulated through choosing the fish the wanted to print. Their goal was to get four good, clear practice prints. We set our prints on the drying rack to dry.












In our second class students added elements of color to their practice prints with crayon, paying special attention to the eye. The highlights of color especially around the eye really brought our fish to life. We cut these out and strung them up so that they looked like the catch of the day.

The very last step of our project was to create a print on a water colored background. To do this students used the wet-into-wet watercolor technique. They sprinkled their paper with salt for a bubbly texture. We brushed away the salt when dry and printed our final fish. With a little experience under their belts this print was a piece of cake.

We matted our final version on blue paper and hung our papers alternately with our "catch of the day". Don't they make an eye catching display?

Cave Painting

Upper Elementary and Middle School students at Readsboro and Currier Memorial are well into a unit on prehistoric cave painting. As part of this unit, we took a virtual field trip to the prehistoric caves in Lascaux, France. We learned that the paintings in these caves were created around 17,000 BCE by the Cro-magnon people. There are many painted caves in this region of France, but this one, known as the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory was discovered by a couple of fourteen year old boys and their dog, Radar, while out on an afternoon hike.
You can learn more about the cave by following the link: www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en/ or take the tour here www.lascaux.culture.fr/. The tour is a new link off the official website and it is really amazing. Lots of interesting info to be found at both sites.
Our art students viewed the art, learned to identify the main characteristics of prehistoric cave painting, and considered what it might imply about a culture that they had the tools, materials, time, know-how, and motivation to assume an undertaking of this scale. The students then developed some rough drafts of their own in this style, which they enlarged onto brown craft paper using chalk pastels. They cut out their animals, pasted them to fill larger pieces of craft paper, and sponge painted in the rock wall. From these we assembled our own version of a prehistoric painted cave. The Currier Cave is now set in the hall connecting fifth and sixth grade classrooms. The Readsboro Cave will be constructed in the art room. Come check it out.



Here's the finished product. Are they not magnificent?