You are reading the archives for December 2010.

2nd Grade Designers

2nd grade students have become green designers for one of their stuffed animals.  Design is when an artist arranges the art elements like line, shape, color, texture, pattern & space to make something useful.  Design is everywhere; everything we use, read, wear, and live in, everyday starts with an artist that designs it.  There are graphic designers, architects, interior designers, fashion designers, and industrial designers.  Good design should have good form (how it looks) and must function (how it works.)

Feltri Chair, by gaetano pesce

Feltri Chair, Gaetano Pesce

The Bubbles Chaise Lounge, Frank Gehry

Students looked at many famous chair designs…

Blow Inflatable Chair, Jonathan de Pas

… and inspired by these creative designs students taped together reclaimed materials to build a chair with interesting shapes and lines, and that functions for their client.  From there we are covering the recyclables with papier mache and started to add color to our design with paint.

 

3rd Grade Clay Coil Creations

creating with coils

3rd grade artists have been exploring clay coil building.  We looked at many examples of coil vessels made by various artists,  

and then spent one class learning to roll coils, build the sides by stacking coils, and slip/score so the pieces stick together. 

rolling

Students explored the line quality of coils and possible ways to use those coily lines to make decorations.  We cleaned up early for time to sketch an idea for our assignment for next week: create a coil vessel with a clay coil line decoration. We worked from our sketch to build our vessels. 

building with coils

slippin' & scorin'

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 Glazed and fired!
 

2nd Grade Reflections

The Japanese Bridge, Claude Monet

2nd Graders studied Monet’s paintings and discovered that Monet loved to paint water and was intrigued with the ever changing reflections in the water.  Click on Monet’s bridge to hear see another of Monet’s waterlily paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  When you get to the museum, scroll down on the right until you find the Monet, then hit the play button to hear Monet’s gardener, its way cool!  Look at our reflections. We created a landscape with a horizon line, mixed colors to make a moody autumn sky,  and used our sketching practice to apply what we noticed about branches to paint trees.  We borrowed Monet’s dabbing painting style to make glorious fall leaves, the whole time folding and printing our painting to make a reflections in the water.

1st Grade Shapes

Georgia O'Keeffe

nam june paik

After exploring lines, 1st graders have moved on to studying shapes.  We are finding the different ways that artists use shapes to create works of art in a unique way.  We have been inspired by two artists that worked in America, Georgia O’Keeffe and Nam June Paik. 

 O’Keeffe uses natural shapes to depict nature.  She paints nature larger than life to highlight the details and make you pay attention.  We chose leaves from a variety of trees, as a beautiful autumn inspiration. 

a sasafras tree leaf shape

Each student looked at their leaf and drew the beautiful, natural shape really big!  Using a magnifying class, we looked for and drew all the lines and details on the inside of their leaf.  To show the amazing color of fall leaves we oil pasteled the lines, and used watercolors to paint in the spaces, over the oil pastels.  Gorgeous colors and shapes! 

Look for our “O’Keeffe Leaf” hanging in the halls of Highland and Hilton!

We are now investigating the “Father of Video Art,” Nam June Paik.  Paik was born in Korea, and moved to the US to become an artist.  Paik uses TVs, video, technology to make all kinds of sculpture; our favorite is his robots.    We discovered many geometric shapes in his sculpture, circles, squares, rectangles, triangles!  We are exploring 2-D vs. 3-D shapes to build our own robots.  

We have found many ways that Nam June is opposite from Georgia: Nam June is a boy/Georgia is a girl, Georgia was born in America/Nam June in Korea, Georgia paints nature/Nam June uses machines, Nam June’s work is 3-D/Georgia’s is 2-D, Georgia uses natural shapes/Nam June uses geometric shapes.  “They are different but they are the same, they are both great artists!”

We learned to fold a 2-D rectangle into a 3-D box, to make a pretend TV…then glued it to our paper.  We then explored how to fold, curl, roll, bend, and glue a variety of geometric shapes to make them pop-out.  We used these shapes to build the body of our robots, than used gadgets to print the background.  Check out our geometric, 2-D and 3-D Robots-complete with pretend TVs!