Pigs, Cows, And Friendship Portraits

When I originally created this lesson last year, I was looking for an idea of a way to help my students learn not to say mean things about each other's artwork. I was tired of 1st graders coming up to me crying about how so and so said their artwork was ugly. In my search, I came across the perfect book; When Pigasso Met Mootisse, by Nina Laden

I love any chance to teach my students about the difference between an author and an illustrator, so we read quite a few books. This one is great because it works as an art history intro to Picasso and Matisse, which we study more about later in the year. It opens up the dialogue about what is nice to say about others artwork, and what isn't, and what happens when we aren't nice.

After reading the book to the class, we talk about self portraits and I teach them about proportion. During my first year of teaching, I thought proportion was best left to be taught to older grade levels, not kindergartners and first graders. Boy was I wrong. They eat it up, and catch on pretty well. After self-portraits, we work on portraits of our best friend. All of this is done on 12x18 paper folded in half with a self-portrait on one side and a portrait on the other. I do encourage the kids to add shapes or lines to the background for pattern.

Next comes color. We outline with marker, and color in with crayon. Most students want to use regular old realistic coloring for their portraits, but a lot of them due follow me down the road of arbitrary color. I never use flesh tones for skin in my examples. After all, we are looking at Matisse and Picasso portraits and self-portraits everyday at the beginning of each class that we work on this assignment. WWMD or What Would Matisse Do? I tell them, "Have fun with the colors" and "It is your job to find ways to make your drawings fun". Anyways, here are a few finished examples. Unfortunately, I did not take as many pictures as I wanted too. There are many more that I really wish I had taken pictures of to share.

HEY STELLA!

For three weeks now, my 1st graders have looked at the artwork of Frank Stella. I do feel that these are a little more "in the style of" Frank Stella than I would like. But hey, they gave us an opportunity to focus on some skills that I have noticed over the past two years students need a bit more practice in; placement, coloring with markers, and cutting with scissors.

During this first grading cycle (6 weeks) in my district, 1st graders focus only on lines, and start to move toward shapes. We started this year practicing using a ruler to make straight lines. Next we were to explore curved lines. Since we

looked at Gene Davis for straight lines, I decided we would stay in a similar vein and discover Frank Stella.

I shared with my students the first time I saw a Frank Stella painting in person at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and how I was blown away by the huge wall of color that stood in front of me with its big swooping curved lines. We looked at some images of his works taking note of what kinds of lines we could find, and how they made shapes.

For this assignment, we used clear protractors.

Once we were done looking through them like sunglasses, we talked about placement. I encouraged students to lay their protractors on their paper and experiment with where they wanted to place the shape of it, changing their idea several times and selecting the best placement. We did this three times, purposely overlapping a bit each time to create new shapes. I learned after the first class that did this not to trace our shape more than three times. Way too many lines after three. After tracing our semicircle shapes, we used an eraser and selected a few areas only that we wanted to edit, removing lines that would create small spaces of color, or helping make some shapes more interesting.

After editing our drawing, students used markers to fill in the newly created shapes with color. We put a lot of effort into slowing down and allowing the marker enough time to soak into the paper so that we could not see through it. 1st graders want to color so fast with markers that it looks like they are drying out even when they are not. A lot of attention was given to slowing down during the coloring of this project. We also had demonstrations on ways to color to without having white holes in our color. Many students were directed to go back and put more attention on filling the shapes with color and slowing down to look for areas that needed more work. The opportunity to really focus on quality and not subject matter was one of the main reasons for creating this project.

 Our final step was to carefully cut out our designs and glue them on black construction paper. Glue and  scissor use are some of the skills that I feel 1st graders need a bit more practice with so that they can have more confidence as the move through school. This assignment allowed us to follow our scissor rules, turn our paper while cutting, and listen carefully to directions such as "do not cut your design into more than one piece." This was also a great first opportunity this year to practice "dot dot not a lot", which I was surprised how well my students did this year. In the past, it has been a challenge to keep their dots small, and not have "puddle, puddle, a lot".

Space Invader Hand Design

 Alright, I know I have put a bunch of pictures on this post, but this was a challenging assignment for my third graders, and they persevered, surprising even themselves with how well it turned out.

We started out looking at artwork by the artist Space Invader, and talking about how he creates his images by putting squares together. I felt inspired to share this artist with my students after reading about him on another art teacher's blog. The third graders immediately related to the artwork, drawing connections of course to video games. Their favorite being Minecraft, which we will do something with later this year.

The first step I gave them in this assignment turned out to be the most challenging; tracing our hands and then pixelating them using the grid. The students honestly struggled with this for days. I almost decided to toss this assignment aside and start something new. It seemed that only about 10% of them were able to do this, no matter how I explained it.

I decided not to run away from this, but let them finish no matter how they turned out. Somewhere along the way things turned around and the students started getting it.

Having decided to stick it out, our next step was to fill the negative space with any kind of pattern they chose. One student decided he would make a pattern of space aliens. This idea spread like wild fire, and students all over the class were creating their own alien patterns. A similar thing happened with the girls in the classes and flowers. I really tried to get involved as little as possible, letting them teach each other. It was great to see a project that previously had them frustrated and wanting to give up, now being driven by self motivation.

We spent some time talking about good colored pencil techniques, with focus on coloring neatly and dark. One thing I encouraged them to do toward the end that brought smiles to their faces as it transformed their artwork, was to outline every shape in a dark color. Some time was also spent discussing geometric and organic shapes.

This lesson was done to prepare them for our next assignment which will deal with mosaic. The goal is that they will be able to create organic shapes using smaller geometric shapes. This turned out to be a great lesson on craftsmanship as well.