complex color wheels and guitars

These were done by 7th and 8th grade everyday students. They worked very hard on them for several weeks.  They are quite large. The guitars are life size and the color wheels are 14" diameter. I saw the color wheel guitar idea here at the dieviantArt and tweaked it for our assignment needs.

Students had to either design a color wheel wedge slice with four sections and then trace twelve times or they had to draw their guitar body neck and head and divided into twelve sections then divided into four sections.

In each section students had to mix the parent color, a tint, a shade and show the complementary color of the parent color.

I allowed the kids to use: Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Black and Magenta tempera paint.

To top it off each student had to paint a gray scale for either the neck of the guitar or that corresponded with the content of their color wheel design.

more to come in the next few days

Eric Carle inspired collages

6th and 7th graders worked for a while on these Eric Carle inspired collages. I would say the results of this lesson were either wonderful or disappointing with very little in between (not posting the disappointing ones). This group of kids was hit by the flu so a lot of them were out of school for quite a few classes during this lesson which really threw off the momentum of the lesson.
Regardless we got some really neat ones I want to share with you.

she got great texture in the "grass" and I love the paper she made for the puma's body
We found using a mix of tempera and cheep acrylic craft paint helped make the best textures. Adding a touch of metalic craft paint to the painted papers really added something special.

great great job getting texture into the painted paper

Great use of bubble wrap for the background texture

was out sick a lot and it shows....but he had a good start

this is great work for this student, she worked very hard on it and was very proud of it, I love the jellybean print paper she brought in for her rainbow

my photos are not doing this one justice, she did such an amazing job on all aspects of it

The sloth is HUGE, on the biggest sheet of construction paper I could find!

he used the metallic paints well

also out sick quite a lot but another great start

and my sample

In the future I will make sure to have a stockpile of pre-made painted papers for kids to pull from if they are out sick, working really slowly or just need bits of one color. This lesson dragged on a bit longer than I wanted because the kids kept making more and more painted papers.

Australian x-ray and dot style animals

All artwork done by 6th grade students with no previous art classes! class of 35 students for this group
(if you "Pin" please, please link back to this post or at least my website....)

The next part of our Australia unit was a x-ray style animal mixed media project. We once again looked at examples of x-ray style rock art and modern day Aboriginal style art that incorporates x-ray style. Last year I learned about the wonderful work of Australian children's author and illustrator Bronwyn Bancroft (you can visit her website here). I try to get several of her books to show the kids how she uses Aboriginal symbols, dot painting and x-ray style to make modern day art. We particularly love her animal ABC book because of all the new animals we learn about.

Next students practice drawing 8 different Australian animals using some worksheets I got from a class years ago. The kids can also look at images from Bancroft's book and try to draw additional animals.

I have tried so many versions of this lesson over the last 8 years from scratch art to paint to oil pastel. With this years combo I am 90% happy and I think next year I will have finally settled on the official lesson.

The kids then choose the animal they want to draw for their final work of art and receive a square 12 inch by 12 inch sheet of light brown construction paper. They use a ruler to make a boarder and then in pencil draw a pattern in the boarder, their animal in the middle and two symbols that would correlate with that animal. So for the platypus above the student added the symbol for river and sun and the emu below has sun and the symbol for emu tracks.

Student's went over all pencil lines with black crayon or sharpie then colored their animal and symbols using colored pencils and paying attention to correct use of material to get vibrant color.

Next came the dotting. I asked the students to find 3/4 colors they used in their animal and symbols and dot around the animal using radiating lines of those colors. Practicing our doting in the previous lesson really helped with the quality of dots in this lesson.

Then came the boarder. I had the kids use black glue to outline the boarder and then set it to dry overnight. 

Then, and this is the part that I still don't love, I had the kids use chalk pastel in two or three colors to color in the boarders. While I think the colors turned out nice and the kids enjoyed using the chalk...even after spraying the colors smudged and started to get messy.  I still suspect that this is an side effect of the super junky chalk pastels I have.

Yet as I have mentioned before, chalk pastel is my least used media in my classroom so I don't want to waste any of my tinny budget buying nice sets. Next year I think I will simply have the kids use oil pastel instead of chalk.

This student convinced me to let her add two baby dingoes instead of two symbols

and this young man choose to draw a Numbat (yes that is a real animal) along with another type of small rodent who's name I don't remember.
 I'm quiet happy with the evolution of this lesson and the quality of artwork this year's student's produced.

Next up: this years Australia unit "wild card" lesson.

Australia dot style mini paintings

Time for 6th grade's yearly study of Australian Aboriginal art. We always learn about dot painting and x-ray style drawing and then throw in something a little different for fun. Last year we made the x-ray style stuffies...I'll post this year's wild card in a few days.  We start our unit learning a bit about the Aboriginal Dream time stories, symbols and dot painting. We talk about why Dream time stories and symbols differ from region to region and most are not to be shared with non Aboriginal people. We also talk about how traditionally dot paintings were not to be shared with non Aboriginals and look at how modern day Australian artists are creating dot paintings that do not revel sacred stories.

After our day of learning about Australian Aboriginal art we looked at a set of Aboriginal symbols and played matching and story building games...I got my set of symbols from a class I took but we also use this set from Aboriginal art online

and this set from this site http://www.aboriginalartshop.com/assets/Artlandish_Symbols_completed_-_footer2.jpg

After practicing using the symbols for storytelling each student chooses one to three symbols for their mini paintings that are about 3x5 inches and done on scrap matt board.

Students paint their matt board a solid base color with acrylic and set it to dry. When dry they sketch their symbol(s) and paint them in solid black.  Then using either the back of a crayon, the back of a paintbrush or the back or point of a bamboo skewer each student radiates the outline of their symbol in dots using a 2-3 colors.

Doing "mini" paintings makes these novel and keeps the kids from getting burnt out on dotting so the lesson gets done in two days instead of dragging on forever. Plus is gives the kids good dotting practice for their next x-ray and dot style animal lesson.

Great work from this year's group of 6th graders....I wish I had time to post all 35 of them !

fun with calligrams

My 6th-8th graders had a great time with calligrams this fall. They got really into it this year....I attribute three changes I made to this years lesson and a T.V. show.

Changes this year:
This year I if they were going to do an object I had them go look up how to say that object in six different languages. They really liked that. This girl also looked up how to say the different parts of a car in different languages.

I also said they could expand from a poem or text that they wrote to other variety of text such as song lyrics (clean version) which a lot of kids choose to do

and dialogue from a movie was another popular choice

Change three was that I got micro thin sharpies along with my thin felt tip markers. The kids felt they had better control of their lettering with the super thin sharpies.

The we had the kids that stuck with with words that described the object in English only

Man do they love the new Dr. Who

Then some 7th grade work:

and some 6th graders

 proof that using just the name of the object but a variety of text size can be very effective 

and the finally there is a show on PBS kids called Word World that has uses very basic calligrams and quite a few kids mentioned when I introduced the lesson.