Sculpture: Altered Books

The first project my sculpture class completed was an altered book project.  I should students a bunch of examples of altered books that have been cut, folded, painted, drawn on, etc.  They received a project sheet with the basic guidelines and the rubric.  Currently my elective has 16 students in it!!!  I'm trying to keep the Common Core stuff to a minimum (gasp!) so that I can keep my enrollment up.  After all, this is an elective class that students are choosing to take instead of a study hall...I've got to give them props somehow!  

Here is the project page and rubric students received:

And here are the finished products!  A few students struggled with this...particularly the ones who added the class two weeks into school and then tried to rush to get caught up.  I'm hoping they will redeem themselves on the next project we've started...paper mache taxidermy!  I'll share progress photos soon!

Some students wanted to paint their sculptures.  I brought out spray bottles and liquid watercolor paint for them to spray.

This student meticulously cut out the piano from her pages using a template and then painted it with acrylic.

More watercolor...

This person used some copper foil to add to his book.  Unfortunately, he went a little overboard with the origami bird.  Originally it was done in paper and was colored purple with marker...it looked much better then.

1st Grade Crazy Pumpkins, Part 2

Here they are...our finished crazy pumpkin collages!

Some students elected to add crazy eyes and mouths to their pumpkins to create jack-o-lanterns while others decided to keep them simple pumpkins.  To finish up the collages, I passed out white drawing paper scraps for students to create eyes, mouths and as some did, moons to add to their collages.  I passed out a piece of brown art paper for them to make stems.  Once these were all glued on, students added a few more blades of grass from their green paper scraps and they were all finished!

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.