Crocker Highlands Art

In April (before Spring break — time flies, I’m really behind in writing!), the 4th and 5th graders learned about Georges Seurat and Pointillism. They learned about “optical mixing” and how your eye mixes two colors that are next to each other; they also learned about “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (aka “Sunday in the Park”), how it took Seurat years to complete and may contain about 3.5 million dots!

After learning about the process, the artists created their own pointillist paintings. The rules for the project were that it was to be a landscape of some sort, and must contain at least one tree (although we greatly expanded the definition of “tree” for one student who is currently fascinated with mushrooms). I developed the lesson from one on pointillist trees on the Art Is Basic blog, but ours came out looking much different. Many of our Crocker artists are extremely detail-oriented, and this was certainly the project for them!

For the last four weeks (also before spring break), the 2nd and 3rd graders worked on symmetry.  Our first project was “name aliens” — another fantastic project from Kathy Barbro’s blog, Art Projects for Kids. The kids wrote their names (in cursive, if possible) on one half of their drawing paper folded lengthwise, then traced it onto the other half — and then traced again to get both halves on the front of the paper (the first day we tried this, I found I had a lot of very frustrated 2nd graders — so then I learned better and spent a lot of time helping them figure out where and how to trace!) With the name on both sides, they decided which end should be “up,” and colored in their letters to make their aliens. Once the tedious tracing part was over, they seemed to enjoy this one immensely (one of my 3rd graders asked me “where do you get the ideas for your projects? This one is awesome!).

For the next two weeks, we created “symmetrical jewels (from Art Projects for Kids again — what would I do without that blog?). The instructions for the kids were to put a dot in the middle of each side of the paper, connect the dots (diagonally and across) to make a diamond/kite shape, divide the diamond and the background with straight lines, and then color it in — with the big rule being that everything had to be the same on both sides. They were able to choose either oil pastels or markers to color their jewels, and we ended up with a great variety of effects!

The 4th and 5th graders, meanwhile, learned about Georges Seurat and  have been working on pointillism. Some of the more detail-oriented artists are only finishing their paintings this week, so stay tuned and I will post on those as soon as I can…

The last few weeks (before spring break), the kinders and first graders worked on a couple of different projects. First, celebrating the beginning of spring, we created “fireworks flowers” — a simple and lovely project I found on the School at St. George Place blog. The idea was to create flowers by making zig zags in a circle around a center, and layering more than one color. We used both crayons and oil pastels, and I modified the idea slightly by asking the first graders to draw a vase for their flowers.

After we finished the flowers, we moved on to texture collages. We had a great time, the first week, doing a “texture hunt” as the kids explored the room with their paper and “naked” (unwrapped) crayons to find textures. The second week, we looked at some of their textures to see what kind of picture they might suggest (could this be a cloud? the side of a house? an animal’s fur?), then they cut their own texture papers into shapes and made collages. I loved the variety of subjects they chose to portray!

Wow! I am so far behind in this — it’s been over two months since I last posted! (sigh)…Well, my excuse is that our last project took a lot longer on the display end than I had ever anticipated…

In February, we got a visit from Raina Telgemaier (the author/comic artist who wrote Smile and created the graphic novel version of The Babysitters’ Club), so we took the opportunity to work on our own comic strips. We started off with a week of looking at comics history, from The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo in Slumberland to Peanuts, Garfield, and beyond. Then we talked about characters, and students were asked to think of a main character that they could create a comic strip about, and they were to draw their character on a character sheet.

Once they had a character and an idea for a story, they drew their comic strips in pencil on four-panel templates, then inked them with skinny sharpies. The older students were asked to begin with a rough draft first, and to carefully erase their pencil lines once they had finished inking; the primary kids were simply to ink over their pencil lines. The older kids also had the option of working in a full-page, graphic novel-type format, while the little ones only had the four-panel template… Aside from that, this was the first time that all six grades worked on pretty much the same project — so it was interesting to see the results!

I found that the kids’ personal drawing styles really started to come out in this project — especially, of course, with the older kids who have been polishing their styles and ideas for years. Many characters were very distinctive, and stylized in pretty sophisticated ways. I was impressed!

As usual, I learned a lot of things I had not anticipated with this one… For one thing, after showing them a lot of great (and totally appropriate for elementary) comics during the week we spent looking at history, I was completely surprised how many kids wanted to do their comics about fighting in some form — I’m not sure if that’s coming from television, or if they see “bang-bang-pow” superhero comic books and think that’s how comics have to be… but it did surprise me how much came out.

But the main surprise for me was how long it took to get them copied to display! I had told them that they would draw their comics big, like the professionals, and then I would shrink them down to put into booklets — if I had known how long that would take, I probably never would have said it! The main template we used for the standard four-panel comic strip was laid out in a box on a whole page, with two panels on top and two underneath — so after I shrunk each one to 53%, then I had to cut them apart to lay them out on a line on the page (back to old-style cut-and-paste layout), and it took forever! They finished drawing their comics in late February, and I only finished copying them a couple of weeks ago — and I’m still working on spiral-binding them so they can be displayed in the art room and the library… whew! So, as mentioned back at the beginning of this, that is my excuse for why I haven’t posted in so long…

Anyhow, as usual our kids did some pretty fabulous work — I’ll have to try to select just a couple or three from each grade, so as not to totally overload the software here… come by the art room to see the rest, I should have them all bound very soon!

Kindergarten comics:

First grade comics:

Second grade comics:

Third grade comics:

Fourth grade  comics:

Fifth grade comics:

The 4th and 5th graders learned about Romare Bearden, the African-American artist of the mid-20th century who was one of the first to use magazine pictures in his collages. They learned that the reason Bearden turned to collage was to enable him to create representational, socially conscious art, to express something important to him about his community and civil rights. So their assignment was to create a collage “in the style of Bearden” — using images clipped from magazines to show a story or scene (if possible), or to express an idea — something that is “important to you.”
Like the 2nd and 3rd graders, they drew rough drafts the first week then set to work on the collages the second week. Also (again much like the 2nd and 3rd graders), I found on picking up the unfinished collages that week that I should have given more guidance in terms of composition — some young artists had planned beautifully, but others were crowding images seemingly at random all over their background papers. So the third week we talked about simplicity (“art doesn’t have to be complicated to be good”) and about emphasis, finding a focal point to draw the viewer’s eye.
When they were finished, I asked them to write a short artist’s statement on what they were expressing, why it was important to them, and how they showed it in their collage. Here are just a few samples — lots more on the walls of the art room, of course!

I think people should recycle more. I showed this by making planet Earth surrounded by trash.

I created this picture to express that playing piano inspires me… I showed this by a thought bubble with inspiring things in it.

Parks are really important — they give kids a reason to get out and play less video games, to feel more connected to nature.

My collage is about Mono Lake and its surrounding desert. This is important to me because I love nature.

I created this collage to express civil rights around the world. It is also about people fighting for civil rights. This is important for me because civil rights keep all people equally treated.

This collage is about my love of nature... nature is my calling, I'm always outside.

I focused on women and their rights. People still assume that women aren't as strong and smart as men, and women are generally underestimated.

My collage is about animals… because they are going extinct and will be extinct if people keep polluting the world.