Ceramics: Tea Sets and Masks

It's taken us a while, but our first three projects in my ceramics electives have finally been finished up.  We started off the year with pinch pot tea cups, moved to coil tea pots (to make a set), and then we did slab masks.  This covered the three basic hand-building skills and of course, wedging and scoring and slipping.

I am doing my best to make my assignments as open ended as possible.  I mentioned in my previous post that I am moving towards TAB in my elementary room, and I'm also experimenting with it a bit in the high school room.  Now, the electives are a bit harder to leave open ended in terms of choice of material, so I am doing my best to make the assignments as open ended as possible.  In the beginning, it was sort of hard to think up assignments that are open-ended, but it's getting easier and easier as we go.

To make our slab masks, I gave students a variety of mask forms to choose from to slump their slabs over.  They were required to give their mask a theme, and to think about texture.  The lion mask above?  That right there is the first 100 I've ever given on an assignment!  The pictures literally give it no justice.  I'm loving that my students are thinking outside the box, too, with their surface decoration.  Our district's mascot is a cougar, so one of my volleyball players made a cougar mask and meticulously glued in fishing twine to the whisker holes she made.  It literally took her 2 1/2 class periods to hot glue those babies into the holes.  So awesome!

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The tea cups and tea pots were two separate assignments but they had to go together.  Students were required to make four identical shaped tea cups (though surface decoration could vary a bit based on the theme).

I've got more to come after this!  Our current two projects that are being finished up are ceramic shoes (life size!) and chia pets. :)

Oil Pastel Jungle Animals

I LOVE this project!  It's definitely a staple in my room now for 5th graders to do this project.  Their classroom teachers love it (because they draw the animal they research for class) and the students love it because they tend to be so successful with the oil pastels!  I even had one of the teachers ask me if she could have a box or two of oil pastels for the students to draw with in their spare time in their classroom! :)

We did this project last year, and it didn't really change at all.  I printed off a picture of each student's animal for them to use as a resource to draw from.  I demonstrated how to blend oil pastels together and how to create different textures, such as rock, leaf, water, and fur.  We also talk about using complementary colors to create value, not just black and white.

Here are some of this year's results!  LOVE LOVE LOVE!

There were so many students who normally turn in rushed, sloppy artwork that did amazing!  I have to admit, I'm one of those bloggers who tends to only upload and share the good work...and this time around, there are student's artwork posted that often never get considered!

3rd Grade: Georgia O'Keeffe Landscapes

Ok, this is a project that I have been waiting AN ENTIRE YEAR to do!  I saw it on my blog roll via Painted Paper while I was in the middle of my usual fall birch tree paintings with 3rd grade.  I usually do a fall, winter, and spring birch tree project with that level in order to teach depth in a landscape but I wanted to change it up a bit this year.  I really love the birch trees but I am actually getting tired of doing them so I switched to this project for the fall landscape.  What's great is that it only took us two class periods to complete these, whereas the birch tree paintings take 3-4, and when you only see the students once every six days, that's a lot of time to stretch out a project.

This is also an awesome project to do because I live in Northern New York, not very far from Lake George where Georgia O'Keeffe painted these!  Many of my students have been there on vacation so it was a way for them to connect to O'Keeffe and the project we were doing.

I basically took the directions for this project verbatim from Painted Paper.  After I presented Georgia O'Keeffe using a power point, we discussed depth and how to make things look farther away or closer to you in a painting.  On that same day, we painted the sky first using light blue paint and we dabbed white in to make clouds.  Next, we left a space and painted the water using dark blue.  I showed students how to streak in white and black to give the illusion of light reflecting off the lake.  Lastly, we added mountains in between the water and sky using brown and a little bit of black paint.

On the second day, we talked about depth again.  We looked at O'Keeffe's fall landscape again and then observed the trees outside the classroom, noticing the difference in details that can be seen in the trees right outside the window versus across the street.  I demonstrated how to dab the yellow and red paint together to create fall trees (also a quick review on primary and secondary colors!).  Some students chose to add a thin line of trees at the base of the mountain.  Once they finished the trees, I had them get a skinny paint brush to add tree trunks and branches to the foreground trees.

My example, from start to finish.

Mouse Color Wheels

This has been a project four class periods in the making...much longer than I intended to spend on it, but as we got into it, I changed my mind as to how it was going to be finalized.  Originally, I was just going to read Mouse Paint with my K-3 12:1:1 class and then have them make mice in the primary and secondary colors, and then place them in a circle to create the color wheel.

But then...a light bulb turn on in my head and I thought..."Why not create a color wheel based on the art in the Frederick book?!"...and ta-da!  This painted collage project was born!

This is my example of the project.

So, on the first day of this project, we read Mouse Paint.  This was a good review of primary and secondary colors for those who have had me for two years already, and a good, quick way to introduce them to the new students in the class.

On that first day, we first colored this worksheet which I found through Pinterest.  Another great example of incorporating Common Core and color sight words for these students.

Also on the first day, I gave students a piece of manila tag board that I had split into six squares for them.  They painted the first three squares the primary colors (good practice for these students to paint the outline and then paint inside their lines) and then mixed the secondary colors on a plate to paint the other three squares.

On the second day, we read the book Frederick.  I had students then paint a piece of manila paper with white and black paint.  We tried to recreate the look of the rocks in the Frederick book.  We also used paint scrapers to add some cool texture to the paint. (In my first year of teaching, I actually did a Frederick project using a worksheet from the Leo Lionni website, which is where I got the mouse pattern from for this project.  You can see those projects here on Artsonia.)

After we cleaned up the paint, we had about 10 minutes left on the second day so I showed students the video of how Leo Lionni made the mice for his books.

On the third day, we drew our rocks and boulders on the back of the grey painted paper and cut them out.  I had the students glue them to white tag board.  Then, they started tracing the mouse shape (like Lionni's version) on each of their six painted colors.  They cut those out too and placed them in the order of the color wheel on top of their rocks.

Finally, on the last day, the students added legs, arms, ears and eyes, just like Lionni did in his video.  This was also good fine motor skill practice for some students to cut out those small pieces and glue them.

Studio Art: Ceramics Unit Part 1: Slab

The current unit my Studio Art students are working on is a ceramics unit.  Ceramics is my ALL TIME FAVORITE!  It's actually what my concentration was in in college, so I always love to do clay units.  Here is the basic break down of this unit in three parts.  Students are creating a project using each of the three hand-building skills.

The first project they completed was a slab, slump or hump mold project.  Quite a few students wanted to do masks, something they did in 7th grade with the previous art teacher.  I didn't want to hinder that since they were SO into it, but other students didn't want to make masks again, so I decided to call it a slump/hump mold project.  I brought down my slump/hump molds from the elementary room and got out the mask forms. First, I showed students how to wedge and stretch the clay, roll it out, and drape it in or on their mold. Then they received the project guidelines.  The project had to (1)have a theme, (2)have multiple types of texture, and (3)have at least 10 scored and slipped pieces attached to the project.

I supplied students with texture rollers, texture stamps, and all of the other clay tools they might need to add interesting texture to their project.

Here are their projects during the last few days of construction.  Currently, they have all made it through the bisque firing and are in the process of being painted and/or glazed.

This one is meant to be Skittles and M&Ms...

Of course, this one is mine!