Textured Landscape

We looked at the artwork of Grant Wood, most famous due to his work "American Gothic".  This painting was meant as a tribute to the hardworking American during the time of the depression.  We also looked at Wood's landscape paintings which inspired a lesson on these textured landscapes.

Students grades 6th-12th worked on creating a collograph printing plate out of various materials.  They began by sketching their landscape onto cardboard.  They choose from the various materials available to them...burlap, string, tissue paper, foil, pipe cleaners, rice, etc.  They needed to build everything up evenly and with no sharp edges by gluing onto to their base, using their sketch as a guide.  They will ink this next week and pull a print revealing a textured landscape.

Students grades 2nd-5th grade worked on creating a textured landscape by first drawing their landscape in Sharpie.  Then using various texture plates and warm and cool colors of crayons, they did rubbings in each section of their drawn landscape. Warm colors in front, cool colors in background, and I explained the why of this.  This would be a good opportunity to ask your student if they remember why?

I will post pictures this week (camera glitch) but wanted to share what we are doing.  Watch for it in the next post.

Folk Art 'Quilt' completed

Students at all grade levels completed their 'quilts and added borders before gluing them to a colored background.  Lots of creative ideas from the students on this one!  It was also a good problem solving task when they missed the opportunity to do alternating positive/negative space with the coloring.  Students really enjoyed personalizing this and making it their own.

Folk Art

Sewing theme

Chubby animals!

Use of two colors...

Love the size of these symbols

Christmas and nice job keeping simple shapes!

We were studying the terms primitive, naive, and folk artists and how these terms are used.  All have to do with an untrained artist with their work being very child-like.  Their perspective and proportions are usually off as well.  We were focusing on Grandma Moses and the amazing story of her success as such a late age in life, her late 70's. Students looked closely at her paintings and observed how much she painted like she stitched her embroidery work with blocks of separate colors. She has such charming work and I love how her paintings tell a story.

We discussed different forms of folk art and how it was often utilitarian in nature, such as weathervanes, decoys, quilts, etc.  We are working on a 'quilt' of our own and keeping the shapes simple in the style of folk artists.  Students are choosing a theme for their work and had to divide the paper into 16 squares.  Each square needs to have an image which took some time to draw.  We will be doing a border for these quilts next week and coloring in one or two colors of marker, focusing on alternating negative space and positive space.  Fun and cannot wait to see them completed!  I did this before with a class and we put them all together to make one big quilt, which is fun if you can leave them hanging on display in a classroom. More images of the complete work next week.

Louis Comfort Tiffany

Students viewed Louis Comfort Tiffany's exquisite stained glass and we talked about his new ideas for imbedding the glass with color and making it look like a painting with depth.  The project we did looks like a stained glass piece but used simple materials such as stained glass patterns, clear transparencies, foil, and permanent markers.  I used this as an opportunity to teach color theory as well.  Big wow factor with these and huge success rate!

Begin with your paper and tape it to the table, then tape a clear transparency over it.

Students color with permanent marker. They remove it from the table and glue crinkled foil behind it.

This student used the smudging of the black sharpie to her advantage by allowing it to blend with her orange marker creating value...love it!

Nice touch with the pink markings in the center. Beautiful.

Frank Lloyd Wright

We were studying the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright this week and his modern design for his time.  Students created texture with watercolor techniques and used these to design their own houses for a refrigerator magnet.  Students glued pieces to a rectangle tag board base and attached a magnet to the back. All levels participated in this project and the results were very creative! If you are ever in Pennsylvania, take the time to visit Fallingwater.