Drawing Each Other in Motion....

kids in 2nd grade are learning to draw what they see by drawing each other in motion.

one model posing so his friends could draw him in motion.

Kids creating fast 2-minute sketches.

Another model taking her job very seriously.

A quiet, focused silence.

Visual resources used in class to show how artists use bent joints to represent movement.

Kids share their most successful drawings at the end of class.

What do we wear outdoors for winter?- Pre-K Collages

Children in Pre-K have been dressing up their paper people in winter clothes. Thanks to the wonderful donations of varied papers from parents, kids had plenty of choices to choose from.

Paper collections have all sorts of variations of paper....from wrapping paper to foil, from textured paper all the way down to hand-painted paper.

These were the people before we dressed them. You too could do this at home.....these people were cut from yellow manila folders.....you can use cereal boxes.....

Here is a fully dressed child....ready to go out and play in the cold....cold winter!

2nd Grade Animal sculptures

Children in Ms. Mahar's 2nd grade have just completed their clay 4-legged animal sculptures. Because this semester I see this class twice a week they will be the only class doing these clay animals. All 2nd grade classes will be creating a person sculpture. Children LOVED creating these little creatures. I encourage ALL parents to go buy self-drying clay and some acrylic paints and brushes so that your child can continue to create at home......remember all parts need to be blended in and nothing should be thinner than your child's pinkie. ENJOY!!

Learning about COLOR through Landscape Paintings

Children in 4th grade are now moving on to learning about color. We began talking about color by introducing the 3 primary colors....."The King Color" I call them. I demonstrated through the creation of a color wheel how 3 colors came easily become 6 colors and then how in adding white OR black we can make 16 colors thought creating tints and shades. As a final activity we used a limited palette of colors to make a whole slew of new colors. These exercises in color creation will go on to create a much stronger landscape paintings once we begin.

This is an example of the dot exercise we did in class. Children were offered only 2 primaries, white and black and were asked to create as many different new colors as they could.

I have a large collection of visual resources which help when discussing such concepts as HORIZON and what is a LANDSCAPE.

This is the color wheel I created as a demonstration. beside each primary and secondary color I also created a shade and a tint of each color.......we made 16 colors from just 5!!!

You create a shade of a color when you add black to any color.....you create a tint of a color when you add white to that color.

The star of the show...."the king colors!!!"

4th Grade Watercolor Paintings of animals (Martell- Stevenson's Class)

In 4th Grade children have been learning about the process of painting. Too often children paint like they draw and painting alone as a medium is not fully explored when this happens. I will go through this process with various different topics just so that it becomes ingrained in them to follow this path when painting. Children begin with painting the background shape without details. They create a background that uses the wet-on-wet technique to create a "far-away" look. the next class children use small detail brushes to add hair, eyes, claws, whiskers, etc.

Other paintings by 4th graders in this unit:

http://murchart.blogspot.com/2010/01/watercolor-paintings-of-flowers-by-ms.html

and

http://murchart.blogspot.com/2010/01/watercolor-paintings-of-animals-created.html

Wire Sculptures Created by 3rd Graders

Children in 3rd grade are exploring sculpting as a medium. First they created animal sculptures and now they are creating wire sculptures based on their sketches of people in motion. Friday, these little artists will paper mache these wire sculptures (which measure about 6-7" tall).