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

classic color wheels

Nothing ground breaking here, just some classic color wheels, but one of those skills I feel all middle school students need to master. 6th graders went through a series of practice exercises before making their final color wheel. First we use crayons and as a group color a color wheel while talking about the primary, secondary and intermediate colors. (Keep in mind some of my 6th graders have never had art). The next class I have table groups work together to paint a rather large group color wheel. They are given the primary colors and have to mix their secondaries and intermediate colors and get them in the correct place on the color wheel.

 After this group challenge I provided some troubleshooting instruction on how to correctly mix colors (what colors are the strongest...moving light to dark and so on) Next class each student has to paint a practice color wheel (takes about 20 min) and then starts creating their final color wheel.

 I pre-print wedges that equal 1/12 of a circle. I ask the kids to manipulate the top arch of the wedge to create a simple shape that will radiate around the circle. Some kids went a little fancier and others stayed pretty plain.

After cutting out the wedge each student traces it 12 times on a large sheet of white paper and then paint their color wheel. When the kids are done painting they need to use sharpie to go over their pencil lines, cut out their color wheel and then glue it to black paper.

 Students are graded on clean brushwork, solid colors and that each student has correctly created their 12 colors.

I don't know if it my camera or editing or computer screen but I feel like the colors the kids made are showing up distorted on the computer screen... particularly in the orange family.

One helpful hint we have learned is to use more of teal blue than a standard blue to get better color mixing. We also add a tinny dot of white to our purple colors to make them easier to see.

O'keeffe inspired abstract landscapes

(aka Slug paintings)
I'm really excited to share this lesson I did with my 6th graders during their color/painting unit. I'm also proud to say I came up with this one and didn't have to "barrow" it (although I'm sure plenty of people have done similar things). I think this would be good for 4th-8th grade.

After completing our color mixing stars it was time to apply our new skills and learn how to tint and shade. I flipped through my art books looking for inspiration. When I came across the work of Georgia O'keeffe I knew she would be a great artist to study but I didn't want to do the typical large flowers. Well thank you Georgia! She has a impressive body of work of landscapes and super, super abstracted flowers. Paintings that I feel is not usually represented when people talk about her work.
So I made a Google Doc about O'keeffe that featured some of her lesser known works. I made sure to include works that used warm colors, cool colors, neutrals and tints and shades.
Here is a small sampling of O'Keeffe's work that inspired us

I wasn't too surprised that most of my student's were somewhat familiar with her work and they had a great time viwing and talking about her work and guessing what the paintings might be about. They wanted to talk and talk and talk about her art. After an entire class period I had to stop them so we could start making art!

I gave each student three rectangles of paper. On the back of paper one I had them list the warm colors (primary, secondary and intermediate). On paper two we listed the cool colors and on paper three I had the kids list a color and then how to make a tint and a shade. Then we flipped the papers back over and lined them up touching each other.

I had the kids start at the upper left of the 1st paper and pretend they were a slug crawling acrross the paper leaving a trail of slime. They slimed across all three papers from left to right. Then we went back to the left-hand paper and down a bit and repeated the slug trail. And then one more time. Finally I said the slug could make one shape on each small paper.

Now each rectangle of paper has 5 spaces to paint. On paper one kids had to mix and use the warm colors, a different color in each shape/space. Same on the cool color paper and ditto on the tint shade paper.
Some kids were really confused on the idea of tint and shade (like this example) but the end result is still wonderful.

After each rectangle was dry I had the kids line up their papers again and go over their dividing lines with a thin line of black paint. This was really hard for a lot of kids and made the artwork look a bit messy. In the future I think I will have them make the dividing lines with black oil pastel or marker. These look so good on display together. Even if the rectangles did not get matched up correctly they still are successful.

the value of value (and gradation) part 1

For some reason I find it easiest to teach value by going paint, then crayon, then colored pencil then graphite. So we start with paint.
Official definition of Value (tone, tint, shade...) "refers to the use of light and dark, shade and highlight, in an artwork."

Middle school definition of value..."this is hard, why do we have to do this....I want to do something fun!"

Ah teaching value at a more advanced level can be a pain in the butt. I find younger students are perfectly happy to learn how to make tints and shades with paint...they delight at the magic of creating colors. Middle school students are less impressed. Remember I'm working with 6th and 7th graders who have never had art before...so they need to learn some basics but are not longer easily amused. I need them to learn how to make tints and shade, tone, or value or whatever you call it in your classroom with paint, colored pencil or crayon and the dreaded graphite pencil.

Most students can easily grasp the idea of tints and shade in paint and when guided create a decent black and white gray-scale in paint and tints and shade of a color. While not the most exciting thing in the world it is pretty easy to to.
Students that feel tint and shade is too easy are challenged to gradate between two or more colors on the color wheel. Then to show their new skills I asked them to tint and shade or gradate a background and add a silhouette image. I even give them some silhouettes of people in motion as I am more interested in their ability to tint and shade or gradate than anything else.
6th graders shows she gets the concept
6th grader who basically understands the concept but needs a bit more practice with making small changes in color and using the paintbrush
7th grader who has been exposed to the concept twice now. Understands the color mixing... decent but not great paintbrush control
7th grader: 2nd time exposed to concept. Has mastered tints, good paintbrush control and starting to think about compositional choices as she choose to have her tinting follow the shape of the silhouette.

One of three bulletin boards showing off value or gradation, lots of teacher and student response to these.

the bucket day 3 - pop art shoe

Ah the contour line drawing of your shoe. Can't get more classic art class than that. And it is a classic for a good reason. Working on contour line drawing is a huge stepping stone for student's to be able to realistic draw people and objects. Contour line drawing expands student's grasp of line, shape, proportion and form. In my mind Picasso was the King of awesome contour line drawings!

Of course there is blind contour line drawing and pick up your pencil vs. one line contour line drawings. I think it is great to practice sighted, unsighted, pick up your pencil and "No picking up your pencil!" of whatever object you are drawing before you get to the final project.

When doing a sighted contour line drawing I tell the kids to imagine their eyes and pencil are directly connected. Your eyes should be tracing the object SLOWLY....like a snail creeping along its contours. As slowly as your eyes are tracing you hand should also be moving. Perspective and proportion get off when either the eye or the hand get ahead of one another.
heheh! from Inner City Snail....a awesome artist/ art movement

But what do we do with that completed contour line drawing before putting it on display? I usually make the kids ink over their pencil lines with micro sharpie and then create a background. For this 6th grade wheel lesson...where we are short on time and trying to hit as many skills as possible, we took a pop art approach to the background.

Students are asked to find two shapes, lines or patterns that occur in their shoes design (can be from any part of the shoe...even the tread...we don't have to see it in the line drawing). They need to take those designs, enlarge them and create a pop art style background with the knowledge that it will be painted.
BLOGGER WHY WHY DO YOU DO THIS!!!!

The backgrounds get painted while learning how to crate tints and shades. While some years I have allowed tinting and shading of a single color, I find a black, white and shades of gray background tends to produced the best end result. I require at least three shades and say white may be used but no straight black. That is because I want everyone outlined in sharpie when the painting is done.

oh I give up with the photos and the rotating and such.

When the background is painted and dry, we carefully cut out our shoe and glue it on for the finished work of art. Ta da!

P.S. I provided a collection of shoes that students can choose to draw from so they don't have to take off their own shoe if it makes them uncomfortable. Stinky feet and such.

the bucket of lessons

During the move to my new school I had to pull all my Tupperware buckets down from the tops of cabinets and was happy to find my "missing" bucket of middle school lesson samples from my first year teaching. Some of these lessons are winners and some are looser. No matter the result, I like seeing what I was expecting of my students that first year and reflect on what I will do differently with the lessons this time.

So in no particular order, and not promising to post one a day...a countdown of lessons from my first year of teaching to celebrate the arrival of year five teaching!

Lesson 1:
The star color wheel...er...color star...ugg...color wheel. I think I made this template up during my student teaching to show 5th and 6th grade students how to mix their colors. I like how the primary and secondary colors are in their own triangle and I have found younger students have an easier time getting the right intermediate colors in the right location when the colors are painted inside the hexagon. As this is more of a color mixing lesson for me than anything, I tend to give the black line template to the students and not make them draw it.

changes to make to the lesson: I want the colors labeled by the students. This means I just need to leave more white space around the star and find a way to label the inner colors. I also notice this sample doesn't have the most accurate green...but they could be from fading or the flash on the camera.

Things I've learned about this lesson:
*With 5th or 6th graders I receive in a middle school program that never have taken art before this can be a great confidence boosting lesson or a mess. To make it a great lesson have the students practice mixing colors on a large group color wheel first and then do their individual color wheel.
*This tends to be a guided lesson till students get that "ahah" moment and are ready to do the intermediate colors on their own.
*Make sure to remind the kids that red and blue are "strong" colors and a little goes a long way.
*I have observed younger students who have not been exposed to much color mixing...or art for that matter...can have a very hard time seeing the difference between blue and blue-purple. They sometimes also struggle with seeing the diffrence between red and red orange and orange. I tell the kids this is OK! They are training their artist eye and I am happy to go look at the colors they have mixed and help them figure out where they belong.
*When everything is dry OUTLINE in Sharpie! It cleans up the look of any color wheel

When I then ask students to make their complex color wheel that includes tints and shades in 7th grade they are ready for the advanced mixing thanks to practice with the star!

Relax a little 5th grade!

I really like teaching 5th graders. As some drunk man told me said this weekend, "They are old enough to know better but young enough to want your love." How true drunk dude, how true.

My current 5th graders are intense little perfectionists. They always have been. It used to be when something did not turn out perfect, this was the first group to tear up the paper and break down in tears. They don't do that anymore (thank goodness!) but they still want everything just so. They constantly are asking, "Is this right? Is this line right, is this shape right, is this the right color, is this the right placement....on and on?" They burn through paper and erasers and have a strange fixation on using rulers for everything. They do beautiful work but it takes forever and I fear their fixation on the technicalities is keeping them from feeling the joy of creating art.

So this year I have been working hard to break them of this need for perfection so they can simply ENJOY creating art. I want them to like what they are doing, not just care if it is "right" or not. We have talked a lot about there not being a "right," answer in art. I spent most of October, November and December yelling...."whatever you have, it's ok!! stop asking." and happily they are getting much better. I feel so confident in their progress that I have decided to push my luck on our next two lessons. I just let them spend 5 classes on very technical Paul Klee geometric cities with tiny tinny shapes and tiny tinny brushes and all the rulers and protractors they wanted.

But now it is time to loosen up. We are going to look at Matisse (that good old wild beast) and the master of wonky art himself, Picasso.

Today we started doing a version of Matisse's goldfish. I gave them LARGE paper, I took away the pencils, confiscated the erasers and forced them to draw with big chunky oil pastels. There were no do overs and I went fast so their was not time to analyze every line. Then before they could think or complain we added our goldfish and I pulled the oil pastels from their clammy hands, replaced them with large brushes, a swirl of green paints and yelled, "5 min to make leaves and vines...GO!" One girl lamented..."mine looks like a kindergartner did it!" "Excellent," I cackled as I trotted around the room rubbing my hands. I heard the word loco being muttered a lot. But wouldn't you know it, when I collected their work it looked great! They are not the most sophisticated artworks ever, but for once I feel like their work has movement and life and JOY it it. We are going to keep working fast, and with lots of colors and at one point I am taking away the brushes and make them finger paint! Even if this lesson ends up being more process then product I'm excited to see the kids break out of their box and give into the simple act of creating art. I realized my goal IS to have them work as Kindergartners. Not judging, not analyzing, not perfecting, but simply experiencing and enjoying!!!

4th grade owls

Our 4th grade project was a dumbed down version of this stunning lesson from That Artist Women. I honestly don't have her skill level with watercolor painting but I sure like to try her projects myself to help improve my own skills and then simplify them for my kiddos.

This project started back when I was out sick and I had two different subs do the drawing of the owl with the kids. I had the sub follow the how to draw owl sequence I posted back in my owl project idea post. I still don't know where the drawing sequence came from! Anyway I had left a stack of card stock with the first step, a letter W in the place and in the size I wanted the kids to stick to. It must have worked out because 95% of the kids had a usable drawing when I got back.


During our next time together I had the kids use a sharpie to go over their pencil lines. Then we used brown oil pastel to add feather and branch texture to our owls. Next I gave them a white oil pastel to draw leaves in the background. Some kids were too frustrated with the white and used yellow instead and that worked out looking pretty good also.


During our third session we painted our owls and used the warm colors to paint the background. Some kids asked to add splotches of green and I said that was Ok. We also talked a bit about analogous colors and why owls would be brown like the trees they roosted in (aka what are the advantages of camouflage) then we talked about what snow owls would be white...camouflage and adaptation. Just a nice little science tie in. I asked the librarian to read Owl Moon to the kids to go with the project but she never got around to it. Oh well...so goes it when you only have class for 20-ish min at a time.

5th grade owls

you know the drill, click to enlarge

Whooo loves owls? I dooooooo! We did owl projects in 5th-2nd grade and everyone whooo saw them liked them. Let's start with 5th grade.
I am working on building the 5th graders confidence in drawing and getting them to make artistic choices. This was my first, "artist's choice," drawing lesson. I choose steps of the drawing that were required and steps that were optional. This allowed each student to personalize their drawing to their own taste, interest, skill level and desired amount of work. Ohhh look at me, I differentiated.

The drawing:
I started by guiding the class through a basic owl drawing. No tracers allowed for this one. We started towards the top of the paper and made a fist. I had them place their fist on the paper and "draw" around it with their finger. Then I had them use their pencil to draw a oval- circle shape about the size of their fist. Next we drew the body of the owl using a basic oval and the idea that the body should be about two heads high. At this point the kids added a beak, ears if they wanted them, design around the eyes and on the face and some w shaped lines for feathers on the tummy. Onto the wings. Students could make the wings laying to the side of the owl, stretching out or with one wing bent to hold something. Next we drew a branch for our owl to sit on and added the feet. Students could put leaves on their branch if wanted. Then I had students add a moon (in the phase of their choice) and stars if they wanted. Finally students could have their owl hold something. Some chose a heart, others had their owls hold baby owls or teddy bears or even a mouse for dinner. Everything was inked over with waterproof felt tip pen.

The painting:
After this was all done we spent two class sessions painting our owls (one class is still not done) I showed the kids how to mix different shades of brown with their watercolors and used touches of blue and purple to create different feather textures on the wings and body. We talked about painting one section of a drawing and then moving onto another area to let the paint dry before we went back to the first section to keep paint from bleeding. We practiced keeping our paint not to thick and not too watery. Eventually we did a wet on wet wash in the back and added salt to make the star/snow effect.

The results: I would say at leat 85% of the students felt good about their drawing. That is way better than usual. I was quite pleased with their drawings and creativity. Our painting results were less successful. We did our drawing on 60lb card stock...my "good" paper alternative. I can only afford to have students do one clay project a year and one project on good watercolor paper. As this was a new lesson I didn't want to risk the 5th grade's one piece of watercolor paper on it. I wish I had. Doing detailed watercolor painting on anything but watercolor paper tends to lead to so so results. Still quite a few kids got a pretty nice end product. It would be interesting to do this lesson with tempera and small small brushes, but I just love the look of watercolors.

video for still life, value and practice

(I'm home sick today if you couldn't guess from the number of posts)
So this is another video from Oregon Art Beat. I like this one because it has a clear explination of value and good examples of creating value in paintings. Also she is working with a viewfinder for still lifes (and squiting like a pirate just for Phil! ). Finally she does a painting a day and has a blogger blog where she posts them all, a great lesson for the kids on practice, practice, practice!

The video from the show

and her blog...........