Artist You Should Know

I love catching my students doing art, or when they bring something in they made at home. 6th Grader Nathan Hoffman is just the case. He has been working with metal at home and made these 2 beautiful pieces. Nathan says he gets the wire from scraps around the garage, sometimes he will scrape the plastic coating off with pliers first.  Working with metal is very difficult, and it was until college for me that i was able to experiment with it. Working with metal brings many challenges and problems and Nathan has done a great job with these pieces.

Nathan Hoffman is an artist you should know at Southdale. 

2nd Grade: What's new

Near/ Far Snowman Drawings

We talked about artwork that shows depth and distance and how often artists use size to show this. We read the book "Snowmen at Night" by Caralyn Buehner, and looked for many sizes of snowmen and also the placement of horizon lines. I challenged students to show snowmen in the foreground, middleground, and background of their drawing. Students were surprised how just changing the size of their snowmen made it look like their drawing showed depth. 

Winslow Homer Seascape Collage

Students learned about the famous american artist Winslow Homer. Homer mainly worked in watercolor and often painted the sea (seascapes). We compared and contrasted 2 of his paintings and talked about how he showed mood in his work, like the weather, the waves being calm or chopping, and what the people in the paintings were doing. Then we made a seascape collage, students tore paper waves and added paper boats. 

6th Grade: Greek Metal Masks

Students learned about the Mask of Agamemnon. (above) This mask was discovered in Mycenae, Greece in the 1800's by Henrich Schlieman. The gold mask, is a death mask of King Agamemnon and is an excellent example of Metal Repousse. Students took inspiration from Greece and the Greek Gods to come up with a mask idea of their own. Students used metal tooling foil to try out the metal repousse technique. It's amazing that today we are using the same techniques that artisans were using thousands of years ago. Students explored how to make raised and pockets, patterns and designs on their masks. 

In college I was lucky enough to visit Greece, and was able to visit Mycenae the place where the mask was found, and also see it on display in the National Museum in Athens. The actual mask is small in size, but the metal work is amazing. Displayed along with the mask are hundreds more artifacts, many gold, that Schlieman discovered along with the mask.

Cookie Stamps

Better late than never...

In December teachers gathered in the art room one night after school and made cookies stamps! Cookie stamps are great to use around the holidays or to give as a gift. The teachers had fun making their own personalized clay cookie stamps. Even those who claimed "they had no artistic ability" (ouch..I hate hearing that! (: ) made excellent stamps. I heard a couple of the teachers say it was a relaxing way to end their day. Art is such a therapeutic and relaxing thing, when you can forget about being perfect or even about having a great product and just let loose, get messy, work with your hands and MAKE SOMETHING! We had fun doing this!

3rd Grade: Art Challenges

ART CHALLENGE: Wood Sculpture

The challenge is you must:

-create a sculpture that is no longer, wider or taller than your hand.

-Use wood scraps, glue and markers only.

-Make a sculpture that is strong and stable

-Make a sculpture you can see in the round.

-Complete the sculpture in 2 art classes.

The rest is up to your imagination!

ART CHALLENGE: Paper Collage

The challenge is you must:

-Work with a partner

-Use paper, glue, scissors and a pencil only.

-Come up with the title first

-Work together- Synergize!

-Complete the collage in 1 art class.

The fun part is...don't tell the students this...the challenge actually ends up being the rubric. Students are  aware of the "challenge" or criteria before they start the project. All of their questions should be answered in the challenge criteria. I love doing these art challenges and I have tried them with grades 3rd-6th and the kids love them! Depending on what you want the outcome to be you can set any criteria. I've even tried one where students had to work with a partner but with no talking. 

It's amazing to see what the products are from these, they usually end up being better than anything i could have ever planned for. 

I introduced both of these lessons with a power point. One was just about sculpture in general, and the other about collage in general. This way students are familiar with the type of art they are making.

5th Grade: Sketchbooks

For this project I wanted to focus on art work that is both useful and beautiful. So many people think  art is just drawing and painting something pretty, but so much in the world around us is "useful and beautiful" art. These books are made from simple materials but when put together they become very useful. We brainstormed a whole list of things we use and see daily that are both useful and beautiful.

We talked about bookmaking, altered book making and mixed media art. For the cover of these books students did a painting technique called marbling. They use a small piece of cardboard to pull paint around on card stock. Next week we will add decoration with markers and metallic pens. These sketchbooks will be for the students personal use, they can be for writing, drawing, or both!

3rd Grade: Gustave Klimt

Third graders learned about the artist Gustave Klimt. For the first part of this lesson students looked at the painting above and his most famous work "The Kiss" (which is below) and made hypothesis about what Klimt was like, just by looking at his work. Students guessed that his favorite color was gold, he was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, he liked girls, he liked to use patten and design, and he liked to make realistic faces. I was shocked how much they were able to learn just by looking at these 2 paintings.

Next, students started their own work. They drew a realistic face and then added cloth or blankets around their figure. Then they started to add patter and design with metallic pencils and markers. They also added gold paper (our substitute for the more expensive gold leaf) and gold paint. 

Students seemed to make a real connection with this project and should be proud of their work. 

1st Grade: Color Chameleons

     For the remainder of the year first graders will be learning about the elements of art. Line, Color, Space, Shape, Value, Texture and Form. For this lesson we focused on color. Students were given primary colors and tried to mix secondary colors on their chameleons. We also talked about various ways to apply paint, for this lesson we used our fingers! Students tried to have all 6 or 7 colors on their chameleon.

As an introduction we also read Eric Carle's "The Very Mixed Up Chameleon".