First and Second Grade Painting Unit.

This month, grades one and two finished up their clay work and started a five week painting unit.

We learned about painting and color. We looked at the color wheel and learned that the color wheel is a tool artists use to help them see color families and color relationships. We learned that one important color family are the primary colors. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. They're important because we can use these three colors to mix all the other colors in the rainbow.

We are learning that it's important to manage our materials in a way that doesn't create a huge wet and colorful mess. We are learning to manage our paints, our water, our brushes, our paper towel, and to use the drying rack. We practice painting carefully each time we paint.

In our first lesson we tried mixing colors right on our paper and made lots of new colors.

We learned that artists sometimes mix paints on a palette and we tried that, too. Palette means plate. We mixed our colors on a paper plate palette. We mixed primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) to create secondary colors (green, violet, and orange). I meant to take a photo of the kids' plate palettes, but what can I say, we got busy and I forgot. To help them set up their colors I placed the primaries in a triangle (just like on the color wheel) and drew circles between each color for mixing secondary colors. The circles were especially helpful for the youngest artists.



We used our paper plate palettes to paint these beautiful gardens. Good work first grade. Good work second grade. Look for these on the entry way bulletin board at Currier Memorial School.

Kindergarten Makes Beaded Butterflies

This is the final project of our five week construction and assemblage unit for kindergarten. We built paper sculptures, paper hats, cardboard constructions, and lastly, these little guys. Little hands had plenty of practice cutting, snipping, gluing and attaching. Could look cute on a holiday tree.

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?

Another Great Fall Project--Ceramic Leaf Dish.

Third and Fourth grade after school program kids "Got Fired Up" about ceramics. Making a ceramic leaf dish was just one of the project they completed during the five week session. Here you can see an older student putting the finishing touches on their leaf after they came out of the kiln.
Below you can see some photos of the the process for making a leaf dish. Here our first and second grade students have pressed the leaf, vein side down into the flattened clay. Look at those little hands carefully cutting around the leaf shape. Have you ever seen anything so cute? To get to this step our little artists practiced making basic clay shapes: a pancake, a ball, a thick snake, a pinch pot. First we practiced using play dough. Then we tried our basic skills using ceramic clay. We also practiced rolling a small slab and tracing around our hand to make a simple cut out before attempting the leaf. We had lots of time to build and explore our own ideas, too. With all this skills firmly in place, making the leaf dish was a breeze. First and second grade students are completing a six week clay unit. We are now practicing skills for making a ceramic fish.

The Elements of Art

Of all the elements of art, line is the most basic. Line, as an element of art, is the focus of this quick beginning art project. In this lesson we discussed the three attributes of line: direction (vertical, horizontal, diagonal), measure (thick/thin, long/short), and quality (straight, zig zag, curving, looping, wavy, meandering, broken, spiral, etc.). We practiced making a variety of lines and combined lines to create patterns. We put our pattens to use in two special projects. This one, "Wild Hair Day", asks students to create a character with a wild hair do, to divide the design into a variety of shapes, and to fill the shapes with beautiful and carefully drawn line and pattern. The results are pretty amusing and provide plenty of practice for line control and variety. This project was completed by a fifth grade student. Fifth grade line designs are on exhibit on the board near the front entrance to Currier Memorial.
Our Fourth grade students enjoyed a similar lesson, but demonstrated their knowledge of line by completing a line design owl. Their work is in progress but I will post it soon.

fall into art

The changing seasons has been the theme for many of our warm-up drawings lately, and it's now abundantly clear that kids love the fall. Their imagery shows apples, and pumpkins, bats, cats, and costumes, but most of all, the glee with which our students await the first raking of the leaves and all the antics that surround the leaf pile.
I thought I might share a sneak preview of some of the art projects inspired by the season. I'm especially proud of my third and fourth grade students who are kicking off a five week exploration of printmaking with a leaf printing project. We've learned that prints are images made by pressure, and that artists that make prints are called print makers. We're also learning that printmaking can be very messy--we're really working hard to be careful with the paint. After we print our leaves using warm colors, we'll sponge paint our background using cool colors. We have gold paint for the veins of the leaves and are printing some additional leaves to cut out and run through the paper crimper to give them an eye catching texture before we paste them on. Below is the finished product waiting for matting. Good work third and fourth graders. Look for these on the walls soon. Happy printing.