Sunflowers!! Our school garden and Van Gogh inspired artwork!

The sunflowers are sky high in our garden! I'm teaching our students a little about Vincent Van Gogh this week, so we decided to bring some of the outside in! Third grade will create an oil pastel/ water color still life of sunflowers. Our fourth grade students will learn to radial weave on a sunflower loom they created from paper plates! Here are some photos to show where we are on the process!

Creating murals and GART!

This week our third and fourth graders are working on some group murals inspired by Kandinsky. By the end of this week, each student at Harris Elementary will have taken part in these projects. We are also creating a large reproduction of America Gothic by Grant Wood, using oil pastels. 

In order for this to happen, we have combined P.E. Class and art. Two classes are working together in the gym, alternating 6 stations. Three are P.E related and 3 are group art projects. Here are just a few photos! 

We recently added another enlargement! Van Gogh's Starry Night! 

Recycled Mixed Media Owls

You may remember this project from last year but I definitely had to do it again because it was so successful with my previous fourth graders. A few years ago I was given some outdated children's dictionaries and I saved them until I developed this project. I was inspired by artist, Susanne Buckner's owl paintings and so then process began.  

 

-The students started by using recycled dictionary pages from old children's dictionaries. 

 -Using watered down Elmer's glue and brushes, the students created a collage with the torn book pages. 

- Next the students painted some sort of perch (branch, rock, fence, etc) for the owl to set on, on top of the book pages. We learned about tints ( a color plus white) and shades (a color plus black)

-The sky was colored with the edge of a pealed crayon so that the pattern of the words would show some. 

-The owls were drawn and colored using oil pastels on a separate piece of paper. 

- For the final step, the students cut out the owls and then I hot glued a packing peanut in between the owl and the background so that the owls were three-dimensional. 

Ceramic tile art for our garden project

We have started our ceramic tile project for our garden this week... The students are making relief tiles inspired by our garden. These will be fired and glazed with vivid colors and displayed inside the fence for all to enjoy in they garden. Check our our clay beginnings! 

Inspired by Hundertwasser

Our fourth graders learned about Austrian painter and architect, Friedrichsen Hundertwasser. The students were inspired by his connection with nature and architectural designs. Hundertwasser wasn't a fan of straight lines, however spiral patterns can be found in many of his paintings. Check out our mixed media project inspired by this awesome artist! 

Here are a few finished cityscape projects inspires by architect and artist, Friedrichsen Hundertwasser .

        

     

    

     

Zentangle Name Mural

Finished Zentangle Mural! Tangled Names of Harris! 

To start the year we are creating a school wide zentangle mural. Each student (and some teachers!) are creating a piece of the mural using their names and some zentangle designs. Here's a sneak preview.

Itty Bitty City Prints

 Itty Bitty City Prints 

I may have posted about this project in the past, but I just love they way that they turn out, so I took a few pictures of the process to share with you. Our 4th graders are working on this right now.  

On the first day of class I introduced the project by talking about architecture and interior design, because they go hand in hand.  I showed the students a slideshow of cityscapes from around the world and had them take notice of the sizes, shapes and structures of buildings and details that they saw.  

Next, I gave each student a 6x9 inch piece of drawing paper. We folded it in have like a book and painted with water color using WARM colors on the top to represent a sunset and COOL colors on the bottom to represent a body of water. 

Next, I gave each student a piece of newsprint to practice drawing their cityscapes on.  When they felt they were ready, each student was given a 4x6inch piece of printing foam.  The students drew the cities in the foam with a pencil and then cut away the sky. 

I set up ONE table for 4 kids at a time to print at with mat for printing, ink, scrap paper, a clean brayer and a brayer for inking. The students then rolled ink over their foam city and printed it in the sky. When they were done with the sky, the students printed their city upside down in the water to represent a reflection. (I know they dont line up because it is a mirror image, but it still looks cool!)

CIRCLE PAINTING! ART FOR ALL, ALL FOR ART!

OUR Gym/Art VIDEO!

The video link above shows Harris Elementary's gym and art class combined last week.  The students learned about circle painting. Circle Painting is devoted to community-based art. Circle Painting is a group of artists, teachers, and community leaders who are all for art and want to bring art for all into communities. They are based in Southern California.  Since we could not bring this creative group to us, I decided to use their project as inspiration and create some circle painted murals, Harris style. 

circlepainting.org

or check them out on Facebook!

We couldn't have done this project without our gym teacher, Mr. Quarando. We had around 60 students in the gym at a time, painting, doing sit-ups, pull ups  and playing a bean bag relay. The gym was set up in stations so that each student could paint and also perform some fitness assessments as well. It was an exhausting week for us, but totally worth it! 

By Friday, all 600 of our Harris students will have taken part of this giant mural project.  This is why I love my job! 

Just a portion of our group circle mural :) The kids are having a blast.