6th grade - Grid assignment update

While the sixth grade students worked on their self portrait, I got inspired to create a portrait, too. Not a self portrait, though. This is a portrait of my daughter! It is on canvas, but it uses the same grid system the students are using. Sixth graders, I hope you enjoyed watching the image come together.

Tuesday of next week we will begin the process of painting the portraits using oil pastels. The grid will remain on the portrait and will be incorporated into the painting design. You should give some thought to color schemes this weekend!

Your portraits look AMAZING!!! Keep up the good work!

4th grade - watercolor painting

The forth grade classes have begun a watercolor op art assignment. Each student created two copies of a landscape and added elements to each picture to make them starkly different from each other.

We are currently in step 2, which is to watercolor paint both images. Each image should have a strongly different color scheme from each other to make as big a contrast as possible.

After we finish painting sometime next week, we will number and slice up each image and glue them alternately onto a backing, then accordion fold it. Finally, we will glue the accordion onto a final backing to stiffen it and freeze the dual image in place. The final project should look something like the pictures with this blog entry...only a whole lot better, of course!

6th grade - HOMEWORK DUE TOMORROW!

The sixth grade classes continue to work on their Durer grid self portraits. Everyone has realized how much focus and attention this takes and I am beginning to see amazing results!

This is a reminder that the color wheel homework is due TOMORROW!

Don't forget to have it in the turn in box by 2:30.

4th grade - Friday fun day!

Tomorrow, we will spend the class period having a relaxing painting day. There is no lesson. There is no concept to master. Just relax and paint a picture of whatever you want! My only requirement is that you keep the paints in good working condition for others.

Art is FUN!!! Enjoy!

6th grade - preparation for self portrait

The sixth grade reviewed color theory in preparation for our first project, a self portrait. The review is the same as the 4th grade review, so I will not re-type it. Make sure you get all the new vocabulary written in your notes! Today we will be taking the reference photos for the portrait. If there is time, I will introduce the concept of grid transfer. More on that later!

Negative Space homework is due today!!!

4th grade - Color wheels and color theory

The fourth grade classes are reviewing their color wheel information from last year. Here it is in a nutshell...

Primary=first
The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. They are primary because no other color can make them; and they can mix to make all the other colors in the world!

Secondary-second
The secondary colors are orange, green, and violet. They are called secondary because they are made by mixing 2 primary colors equally.

Tertiary=third
The tertiary colors are yellow-orange, red-orange, red-violet, blue-violet, blue-green, and yellow-green. You can make tertiary colors by mixing a primary equally with a secondary related to it. Or, you can mix one part of one primary with two parts of another primary. For instance, one part red and 2 parts yellow makes yellow-orange.

The colors are organized into a COLOR WHEEL. A color wheel looks like this...


Next, we talked about 4 color schemes that are commonly used in art. They are Complimentary, Analogous, Triadic, and Monochromatic.

COMPLIMENTARY

These are colors opposite on the wheel. They look exciting next to each other.


When mixed, they make brown.



ANALOGOUS

Analogous colors are next to each other on the wheel. They look calm and peaceful together.
TRIADIC

Triadic reminds us of triangle. These colors form a triangle on the wheel. They look good together and form a balanced picture.

MONOCHROMATIC

Mono=one, chroma=color. Monochromatic=one color! A whole painting made up of the lights, mediums, and darks of one color!

EXTRA CREDIT!!!!! Read and report...

Here it is! The first EXTRA CREDIT on the blog!

Read the entry below and tell me all about it when you return to school this week! You will receive 5 extra credit points.

CLAUDE MONET and the IMPRESSIONISTS

Claude Monet was born in 1840. He was the student of Eduard Manet. At the time Monet was alive, the accepted and famous painters in Paris all submitted their work to THE SALON, an art gallery. If you could get your work into the Salon, you had it made and were considered a successful painter. Monet took his first painting called IMPRESSION OF A SUNRISE to the Salon hoping it would be accepted. This is what it looked like...

The people at the Salon said; "What?! It's not finished! Look, we can still see the brush strokes! This is an under painting! Bring it back if and when you finish it, or better yet, don't come back at all!"

Monet could have given up...but he didn't. He and some of his friends who had the same beliefs about painting said "FINE! We don't need you! We'll hold our own art show!"

And that is just what they did! It turned out that the people of Paris loved the artwork and gave the whole group of painters a new name taken from Monet's picture, Impression of a Sunrise. They became known as...THE IMPRESSIONISTS!

The Impressionists wanted to capture how light changed the colors of things. They painted outside. That meant they had to paint quickly because the light changes so fast!

Monet liked to return to the same place over and over again to paint it in lots of different types of light. Here is a series of Haystack in a field near his home...

Here is a series of the Rouen Cathedral...

As Monet got older, he liked to paint in his own garden, which was beautiful. He didn't realize that his eyesight was getting worse. When he finally realized the problem and had it fixed with a surgery, he was upset at how bad the colors were in many of his garden paintings. He destroyed most of them and painted new ones! There are a few paintings he didn't destroy, though. Here is a before the surgery picture and an after surgery picture!

Claude Monet died in 1926.

4th grade - Still life drawing

It is time to try your hand at drawing from real life! In class today, we selected items from around the room and/or the still life box to sketch using what we learned about blocking in (starting with simple shapes) and building detail.
I would encourage you to try this at home! If you practice the skills you learned in class and bring me your work, I will award you some extra credit.

6th grade - Negative Space - HOMEWORK!!!

Today we discussed the concept of NEGATIVE SPACE. Negative space is the shapes made by the space around an object. Artists look at both the positive shapes (the objects they are drawing) and the negative space around the objects when sketching out an image.
In class we drew the negative space around a collection of colored pencils and scissors. A worksheet about negative space went home today. This is homework and it looks like this...
This worksheet will be due Wednesday, January 21st.

Note: There is no school on Monday, January 19th, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Tuesday, January 20th, we anticipate that many of the 6th grade classes will miss art due to the inauguration of President Elect Obama, which they will be watching. Wednesday, the 21st, students should come to art prepared to have their picture taken in preparation for a self portrait project. Make sure your hair is how you want it! The photo will not be published in any way or fashion. You, the student, will receive the one and only copy of the photo as a reference for your artwork. Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns about the self portrait photos.