Birds with Printmaking

I taught the elementary students how to be a shape detective when learning to draw birds this week. Looking at photographs, students drew the basic shapes on a dry erase board for practice.  They then connected with lines that made the outside shape of the bird.  They will use this method later as well when they learn to draw animals from magazine images.  After practicing a few different varieties of birds, they drew one on paper.  They used this to trace onto a foam printing plate.  They did need to go back and press in their lines again with the dull pencil to get a good impression before adding the ink. 

We then used white printmaking ink on black paper...the results are awesome!

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.