Studio Art: Grid Portraits

I promise I haven't left you!  I've just been doing a little soul searching, if you want to call it that.  In other words, I have been feeling like I'm in a rut and I'm not happy with the way I'm teaching, particularly in my elementary grade levels.  So, with that being said, my next few posts are going to be about my adventures in TAB!!  Yep, that's right.  I'm working on transitioning a few elementary classes into choice based learning.

At the high school level, I feel as if the choice based learning comes a bit more naturally, though I still feel as if I need to loosen the reigns a bit.  So, as I share some of our high school projects that we have completed this year so far, you'll hopefully notice me loosening up on requirements.  

But, enough of that for now.  These oil pastel self-portrait projects were completed by my Studio Art students (9th-12 graders), and it was something that really pushed the boundaries for them.  We looked at artwork by various portrait artists, including VanGogh, Frida Kahlo, Kehinde Wiley, and Chuck Close, discussing how each artist used the self-portrait for a different reason.  Using the grid method, I had students draw a "selfie" they had taken of themselves onto 16"x 20" paper.

Initially, I left the choice of material open ended for students, as long as they used color.  I decided to use oil pastels to do my self portrait, something I've never done with oil pastels before.  Many of the students decided to follow suite, seeing how I was challenging myself to do something new.  I have to say I'm extremely happy with how these turned out!

The 10 Looks of Mrs. Impey: "I left my sketchbook in my locker...can I go get it?"

Done by our two exchange students...fabulous work for two ladies who haven't hard art classes in years!

These students used colored pencils, or a combination of colored pencils and oil pastels.

I also used these drawing projects as my interim assessment for DDI.  I don't know if any of you have to do Data Driven Instruction, but my fellow art teachers and I have been getting creative with how we give our assessments.  Instead of doing tests or quizzes, like we had to do last year, we are making the artwork the assessment.  Since we have been stressing observational drawing, this fit in perfectly as it fell in line with my curriculum but it also worked for our DDI rubric for the 2nd quarter.  Less work for me and less work for my students!

1st Grade: Winter Landscapes with Depth

My 1st graders finished up these awesome winter landscapes right before we left for the winter break.  I really like introducing the concept of depth to 1st grade because I think they can actually understand it and work with it in simpler forms.  In the past, I've done pumpkin landscapes with depth and a Northern Lights landscape, so I decided to combine the two for this year's depth landscape!

This project took two days and about 10 minutes in a third class to complete.  On the first day, I showed students a video about how the Northern Lights are created (of which this fits really well into their Common Core Listening & Learning strand about Astronomy!).  We then got down to work drawing our landscape out.

Students used black oil pastel on black paper.  I first asked them to draw a big snowman, just the body, towards the bottom edge of their paper, and then a horizon line behind it.  I posed the question, "If you wanted to draw a snowman in the background, how would you do it?"  Most of them understood that it had to be drawn smaller, but I showed them how to draw it smaller and farther up on their paper.  Again, I had them draw a horizon line behind that snowman.  Then, I asked, "What if you wanted to draw a snowman in between those two snowmen? In the middle-ground?" It was like a light-bulk turned on above their heads! 

We added the mountains next, and then used three colors to create the Northern lights in the sky.  This all happened on day 1.

On day 2, we talked about how we were going to color all the snow.  If snowmen are white, and the snow on the ground is white, I explained that they would have to do something a little different to the snow so they wouldn't blend together.  Luckily, there was snow on the ground outside the windows so we could look at how the shadows from the building look blue in the snow!

After the snow was colored, the mountains and the details on the snowmen were the last things left!

3rd Grade: Wayne Thiebaud Cake Drawings

Hopefully I'm going to be playing catch-up these next few days!  I've got SO MANY projects to share from before the winter break, it's not even funny!  Things have been insanely hectic with the holidays, conferences, and committees at school.  I also recently became a consultant for Jamberry in order to help pay medical bills from last year.  My blog has unfortunately taken a back seat to all of these things, but it's my goal to make sure that stops happening!

This next project I'm going to share is probably one you've seen on Pinterest.  My students in 3rd grade LOVED making these oil pastel Wayne Thiebaud cakes!  (Did you know his last name is pronounced "tee-bow"?  Like the football player?  I didn't until I presented this project!).  This is the first time I've used this artist as a reference in my classes, and the students just loved it.  I find that they always love oil pastels anyways, because it's so easy for them to be successful with color blending and value, but the added fact that they were designing cakes like the Cake Boss just made it even cooler!

I am in LOVE with this one!  There is a local, elementary art show coming up and I wasn't sure if I'd have four pieces to send to it, but I do believe that this one may be going! :)

This project even correlates with Common Core math, as students were turning basic shapes into 3-D forms.  We used vocabulary such as cylinders and cubes to describe the shapes of our cake tiers.  Students practiced drawing their cakes on a worksheet for the first day.  Then, they drew them on 12"x18" black paper the second day, and I demonstrated how to blend the colors together on the cake tiers, adding in a little black for shadows.  On the third day, students finished their tiers and colored the background, finishing them up!

5th Grade: Oil Pastel Jungle Animals

I think...but I'm not sure...but I think...that this may be the last "catch-up" post I have from the 2013-2014 school year!  Woo-hoo!  Then it's onto the month of July and the summer program activities...

These beauties are oil pastel drawings that my 5th graders completed right before the art show in May...oh wait, art show?  Whoops.  I've just realized that I haven't even uploaded photos from the 2012-2013 art show onto my blog yet!  Eek!

This group of students absolutely LOVE using oil pastels.  I honestly think I could do an entire school year of oil pastel projects with them and they would be ecstatic!  They had done an oil pastel project last year...oil pastel poinsettias, which were observational drawings, and loved creating it.  This year, this particular group of students had only completed three...yes 3...projects this year.  The first was the complementary clay checker boards project, which I started before my maternity leave.  They finished them just before I came back.  I then did the 3-D color wheels with the students, which took forever.  Then, I had them do monochromatic paintings...and come to think of it, I never shared those either from this year's class.

My substitute sent the students home with checkerboards, against my directions, so I wasn't able to photograph those. :(  Either way, when it came closer to setting up the art show, I realized that I didn't exactly have a wide variety of choice for this grade level, nor did a majority of the students really have anything to showcase their abilities.  So, the week before I started set-up, I introduced this project.  

I asked students to choose an animal from the jungle or rain forest to depict using oil pastels.  This also connected with the Common Core because the students were reading a book about the rain forest.  Usual rules applied (having a good background, color blending with the oil pastels, etc.)  Students started them in class and then I sent a box of oil pastels up to each 5th grade classroom so the students could finish these before the art show. EVERY student finished theirs and brought it back to me!  Amazing!  They were all also extremely proud of their work, and I am too!

Kindergarten: Jasper Johns' OIl Pastel Numbers

The second official project that kindergartner's finished up before my leave was this Jasper Johns number project.  This is a repeat project that I did from last year, with some alterations.  Last year I was able to spread this out into more of a complete unit because I saw students twice a cycle, but this year I didn't feel I could spend that amount of time on this project, so I shortened it and altered it a bit more to fit within the Kindergarten Common Core Math standards. 

This project took about 2 1/2 days for most students to complete.  On the first day, I showed students my power point about Jasper Johns and we talked a bit about pop art.  One of the math standards for kindergarten is being able to count objects that are in a row, a column, a grid and in a random assortment, and then write the appropriate number.  To mirror that, I paired students up and gave them a brown bag filled with 9 wooden beads of different sizes.  One at a time, I had the students pull out a handful of beads, count them and write the number down in the first square on their paper in pencil.  Their partner was supposed to double check their counting and the number they wrote.  They alternated until each partner had their six squares filled with a number.

For the second class, I passed these back and showed the students how to turn their numbers into bubble numbers.  For their next set of directions, they were asked to choose ONE oil pastel color to color in their numbers.  For the most part, everyone followed that direction quite well.

The final portion of the second class and the subsequent class was to color in the background.  My directions were that students were supposed to choose THREE oil pastel colors to color in the background behind their numbers.  This is where some students didn't follow directions, or appeared to not be able to follow directions.  Many students grabbed an oil pastel and started coloring right over the top of their numbers.  Some colored around but used more than three colors.  I gave multiple demonstrations at each table to try and show students how to color AROUND their details, but many still struggled, so I sense that this is something that this group will need more work on!

1st Grade Oil Pastel Pumpkin Patch Drawings

FINALLY we have finished our first project in 1st grade!!!  Our oil pastel pumpkin patch drawings are now complete!  This is a project I blogged about last year and we followed the same procedures as last year, which you can read about in this post.

On the first day, we did two pumpkin drawings....the first was for students to show me how they drew pumpkins and the second (on the back side of the paper) was where I showed them how to draw more realistic pumpkins.

On the second day, we talked about depth and using multiple horizon lines.  We also talked about size.  We drew our pumpkin patch with fall details using white oil pastels and then started to color them in.  We used the third day to finish coloring these.

Coming up next will be a skeleton project for the Day of the Dead (which also links to the NYS Common Core Listening & Learning strand about the human body in 1st grade!).