Leaf Relief

You know when you have a good art project?

When it is repeated in MY class!

I’ll admit, I like variety. I get bored easily and I like to try new things. So needless to say my lessons plans are CONSTANTLY changing. But sometimes you have that one project that just clicks. The children love it, YOU love it and the results are amazing.

I saw this one first on the ever so popular Cassie Stephens blog. If you don’t follow her you are definitely missing out. In fact go there right now and check her out because the inspiration there is off the charts!

The leaf relief part of the project I’ve done before. When displayed I always get questions and folks are shocked to learn that it isn’t some fancy metal.

It’s just plain ol’ aluminum foil ya’ll.

This year I did something a little different with the backgrounds. To incorporate an artist I introduced Mark Rothko and his color field paintings. The students were encouraged to develop their own color story. They ran with it and the end products did not disappoint.

 

 

 

 

Mixed Media Trees

This year I decided to try something a little different with my fifth and sixth graders at the start of the school year. Instead of doing a bunch of smaller projects during our 45-minute classes, I thought we’d try tackling a long-term project and see how that went. This group of kiddos tends to be a little…how do I say it…chatty and distracted

Sometime over the summer, I saw a painting pop up in my facebook sidebar. You know the stalker sidebar that somehow reads your mind and knows what to show you? Yeah that one. Well it inspired me so I did a little research and I found that someone else had done something similar on this blog here. I tweaked it slightly and made a mixed media project of our own.

The squares were colored with oil pastel and textured with a plastic tool that is now called a “scrape daddy” thanks to my sixth graders. They watercolored over the piece, painted the tree with black acrylic and added detail to the tree with metallic sharpie. It was a successful long term project. I can’t wait to start the next one with them!

Color Wheel, take 1

I saw this project online one day and took a screen shot with my phone.  If you know the source please let me know so I can give credit!

This is the work in progress shot.  My fifth and sixth graders are studying the color wheel.  I reference it a million times when teaching so why not?  I basically gave them the primary colors and had them mix everything in between.  If you can’t tell, they first sketched an eyeball.  They thought that was a little odd at first.  I had them section off the colored portion of the eye (iris) and then mark in pencil the colors they need to mix (in the proper order).

While they were working I kept hearing “it’s like magic,” “this is so cool,” “I’m never buying colors again!”  I think they enjoyed this one.