Emphasis and the O'Keeffe Inspired Flower

This is actually the third year that my students have created up-close flower paintings while learning how artists create emphasis, and being introduced to the works of Georgia O'Keeffe.

I found one of the best videos on YouTube for teaching emphasis. You have to check it out. Here is the link https://youtu.be/rG9gx6kjDzI I do not own this video or anything, just found it while scrolling around on YouTube looking at nerdy art teacher videos. 

After the kids are all jazzed from the video, and I have them identify what is most important, and how we know it is most important, in different artworks at the end of the video we do a few small exercises for them to show me that they understand how to use emphasis in their art.

Their flower paintings actually take several class visits to finish. On the first day they draw their flower and begin outlining it with sharpie. The second day, they start coloring in only the flower using oil pastels. I try to get them to experiment with highlights and shadows (few ever do), They do actually play around with and learn to use the pastels pretty well with this project. They are usually still coloring with oil pastels on the third day. The fourth day, we paint the background with water colors. 

Another thing that I like about this assignment is that I get to talk to them about mixed-media. I explain that their paper is special paper called mixed-media paper. We discuss what media is, and why we need this paper to use different kinds of media. I also get to show them how to get bright colors, and not watered down colors out of their paints. This project also works well to review warm and cool colors. We use color temperature to help create emphasis. Students have to pick either warm or cool for their flowers, and use the opposite for the background. 

Here are some more examples. Enjoy.

3 Valuable Weeks

With the way my schedule is at my school, students come to art once a week for 50 minutes. With that said, this simple lesson took 3 weeks. In the district that I teach in, our curriculum is based on the elements and principles. Part of our fall curriculum for 4th grade is value. I have not seen evidence over the past few years that my students have held on to an understanding of value, so this year I decided to try a new approach. Prior to doing any works of art with value, my 4th graders made value scales using pencil, oil pastels, and water colors.

These media worked great for this lesson since the process for creating values with each one is so different. This also gave me a chance to teach some watercolor and pastel techniques that I have not covered in the past. Students experimented with varying pressure to create values with pencil, adding white and black to a color with the pastels, and diluting their paint with varied amounts of water for water colors. Also, this gave one more opportunity to practice our skills measuring and drawing straight lines with a ruler, something that drives me nuts that most students seem to not know how to do.

Obviously, we used pencil, oil pastels, and water colors, but we also used multimedia paper. This gave an opportunity for me to say "media" a million times and to explain it. Our value scales are just the first stage to a lesson that we are working on currently that is focused on rhythm. Students are using values created with one color in and all three of these media for their first mixed media project of the year. Some good scaffolding going on here. I will post about the rhythm assignment in a couple of weeks when we are finished, so far this has all been very engaging to them, though it doesn't look as exciting.