Summertime means ICE CREAM

I've been having fun doing ice cream art with my students..........
My 2nd/3rd Grade combo class each did an acrylic ice cream painting, then I put them onto a blue painted canvas for our auction last weekend.  The kids loved seeing their art mounted with together with their classmates!  Thanks to all my blogger friends for all the great auction art ideas.  I did a different project with every class and somehow can only find pictures of this one.  (Did I really not take pictures of the others?  At this time of the year, everything seems to be going at lightning speed and I have no idea if I took pics or not right now.)

And here are the Ice Cream painting my high schoolers did on canvas with acrylics.  The inspiration was Wayne Thiebaud.  First they painted a vibrant background, then the ice cream cone, and another background.  I tried to encourage them to leave a colored halo around the subject and some of the vibrant colors showing when painting the new background, but some got carried away and covered up all their original background colors.  Oh well, it was still a fun project.

This was 1st step, painting vibrant background.

Food Play....

"Sniffy" the mole.

Friday was a "Play with Food" day.  Kids enjoyed it, so did I!

These were done by high school students.  

They loved looking through the book, Play With Your Food, by Joost Elffers.

The blonde on the left was named "Barbara Streisand"....Nope, I didn't ask?

Mother's Day Weavings!

I saw a Christmas ornament idea using embroidery thread and cardboard circles.  I decided to use this idea for Mother's Day with my grades 5/6 students.  I used cardboard hearts though instead of circles.  (Ouch, cutting cardboard hurts, and I didn't even have to cut them all b/c I had help, but still ouch!)  These hearts look much smaller in the photos, but they're actually about 7" across and 7" tall.
This was a great texture project too.  The only hard part of the lesson was teaching some of the students how to tie their pieces of yarn together when they added a new color.  I taught the proper knot technique by giving students practice yarn first, but there were still a few kids who needed quite a bit of "knotting" help.
After the weaving, kids made their card and attached it to a piece of yarn to be used to hang the heart in a window or on a wall.

Mother's Day Hands

Okay, how is it that I've been an art teacher for 9 years and this is the first time I've done an art lesson where the kids have to trace their hands?  Hmmm?
These cute Mother's Day cards were done by my grades 2/3 and boy did they have a hard time tracing their hands!  (Thank goodness I happened to have their lesson scheduled the day before a different lesson w/ my 1st grade students.  I had planned a different card, but they were still supposed to trace their hands.  NO WAY was that going to happen, I took the time that night to make heart templates for the 1st graders to use instead of the hand tracing.)

I saw this idea on Pinterest. It was a photo and the link went to Tumblr.com, then I couldn't find the original?  This always happens when I get into Tumblr, does anyone understand that site?

Inside the card, the classroom teacher had the students glue in their Mother's Day poems that they'd been writing.  I love the teachers I work with, they're so appreciative of my art lessons.  I am really blessed.

Mother's Day Hearts

Thank you Kristin at For the Love of Art for sharing this lesson. My 7th grade students had fun using it for their Mother's Day cards!  Splatter paint is always a hit, and so fun for me to find another project where it can be incorporated:)
We used oil pastels on 6x8"construction paper for the concentric heart drawings.  Then before cutting and weaving, I gave students 2 pieces of small scratch paper and had them draw one heart on each.  Then we went through the process of cutting one of the papers in vertical strips up to a line that was drawn horizontally near the top of the paper.  (Approximately 1/2 inch from the top.)  Then second piece of paper was cut into horizontal strips.  Those strips were then woven through the vertical strips, and then came the whining..."Mrs. Smith, I can't see a heart, this doesn't look good."  At which I reminded them they were working with scratch/practice paper and the "REAL" one decorated with many colorful hearts will look great.  I love the way they turned out.  Some kids have a hard time accepting art that's abstract, and they had a hard time seeing the beauty in their woven heart.  The more we do this kind of art though, the better their appreciation becomes.  (Prayers said, fingers crossed.)

Jazzy Guitars Grades 5/6

Doing this lesson really helped the kids get the concept of rhythm and movement in art.  Diagonal lines and shapes for "movement".  Patterns and repetition for "rhythm".  I repeated that over and over again and pretty soon the kids were saying it on their own.

BIG thanks to Holly at "Lines, Dots, and Doodles" for posting this lesson and inspiring me!

The steps were:
Draw with pencil
Trace pencil with black marker
Paint everything, don't worry too much about staying in the lines b/c going to go over them a 3rd time
Paint over black lines with black paint

   

Inky Monsters

You know those art lessons that you really want to do, but continually move it to the back burner because you're really nervous about trying it?  (Or maybe it's just me?)
The first time I saw Stefan Bucher's "Daily Monsters" I flipped.  So wonderfully simple yet fantastic.  I so wanted to share the idea with my students but my fears were:
1.  Ink.  My classroom is not an "art room".  I don't even have a sink in my room.  (So far, I'm the only art teacher I know without a sink.)  Hence, using INK for a project seemed daunting at best.
2.  Blown Ink Monsters.  Sometimes when I give my students lots of freedom/little instruction many of them freeze and look at me like I just told them perform brain surgery.  I then spend a significant portion of the period coaxing these students to really stretch and come up with something creative w/o me spoon feeding it to them.  I realize this is my job, but when my lessons are more structured and the expectations are more defined, my job becomes easier.

Well, I bit the bullet before spring break & assigned the students the task of creating their own "Ink Monsters".  I showed them some of the Daily Monsters created by Mr. Bucher first.  Then my fears quickly disappeared and I had a blast watching and listening to my students create fun and fanciful monsters.

Step 1 - drop some ink on paper, we used white construction paper size 5x7"
Step 2 - blow ink around with a straw, we tried skinny stir straws too and they didn't work as well as regular straws. I also cut the straws in half, thinking the kids wouldn't have to blow as hard.  I'm not a scientist though, so  I have no idea if this was true.
Step 3 - Embellish the ink blot w/ a black marker and create a monster.

These are some of the Monsters they created: