Pre-K Christmas Trees

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! The new year is around the corner (as well as all of our snow)! Enjoy the rest of the vacation and I'll see you next week!

In PreK art we mixed blue and yellow to create green paint! We created our own Christmas trees, decorating them with gold metallic paint!

Here is a student example:

Be ready for new and fun art lessons in 2013!!

Fun Stuff: Crayon Melt Art!

In need of a fun crafty art project during Christmas break? Do you have a lot of old crayons and a hair drier?   

If you do, you can create your own crayon melt art! 

As recently seen in the Miss M's art room, crayon melt art is a fun way to recycle your old crayons to create an abstract masterpiece! Here's a How To and some pictures of the art process:

Materials:
canvas (any size. you can purchase a canvas at most craft supply stores)

crayons
hot glue gun
hair drier
drop cloth (I used a garbage bag underneath my canvas to prevent crayon melt spills on the floor)

Steps:

1.) Hot glue your crayons to one end of your canvas. Make sure the tips are glued pointing down on the canvas. You can glue the crayons down in any color pattern. I chose rainbow! Also, before you start, make sure you put something down underneath your canvas. This can be a little messy!

2.) Turn on your hair drier and point it towards the middle of your crayons. It will take a few minutes for the crayons to start melting depending on how hot your hair drier can get. It's important to be patient when creating art! 

3.) After a minute or two the crayons will begin to melt. To prevent the wax from blowing off of the canvas, try pointing your hair drier downward on the crayons. This will make the airflow and the wax melt downward.

4.) Slowly glide the hair drier across the crayons so that all of the crayons melt evenly. The longer you hold your hair drier on a certain crayon, the farther the wax will drip and run down your canvas!

*Note: you can also start smelling the great smell of crayons (does anyone else love that smell?) Also, try not to touch your hair drier to the crayons... I did and the next time I blow dried my hair, it smelt like crayons!

5.) When you are finished, let the canvas and crayon drips dry. You can now hang your masterpiece up to brighten any room! *Note: crayon drips can be brittle so be gentle when touching your canvas!

:)

4th Grade Keith Haring Movement Figures

In 4th grade we have been learning about artist, Keith Haring. Haring was a very popular artist who created fun and colorful cartoon-like figures. His figures did not have features, but were filled with bold color and outline. His figures often looked as if they were dancing!

Students learned about Haring's life, inspirations, and legacy in the art world. In this lesson, they also learned about complementary colors! These are colors located across from each other on the color wheel. (red & green, yellow & purple, blue & orange!) Complementary colors, when put next to one another, are appear very bright!

In this project, students created their own Keith Haring figures depicting movement four times. For each figure, the student had to use a pair of complementary colors. The fourth box was a free choice and the student could use any set of colors to paint in their figure!

This project was so fun and made us want to dance!

2nd Grade Britto Inspired Still Life

In 2nd grade, students learned about the bright and colorful world of contemporary artist, Romero Britto. Britto loves to create paintings that have vivid colors, fun patterns, and thick, bold outlines.

For our project, students learned about still life paintings. Still life art is a picture of a scene that contains inanimate, or not living, objects. Still life is a famous subject for artists.

We created still life watercolor paintings of flowers in a vase inspired by Romero Britto! Here are some examples of student work:

Fabulous job 2nd grade! Your artwork came out so beautiful!

Fun Stuff: Make Your Own Watercolor Paint

Over the past few months, the marker monster has chowed down on tons of dried-up makers. He ate so many markers that he was literally full! There are so many great ways to recycle dried-up markers. One thing that you can do with your markers is create your own watercolor paint!

Materials: to make your own watercolor paint you will need dried-up markers (separated into colors), a cup of water, and pliers.
1. First, using pliers, take the plug off of the bottom of the marker.
2. Using the pliers, take the foamy marker middle out from inside of the marker.
3. Put the foamy middle into a cup.
4. Add a few marker middles (of the same color) into the cup.
5. Add water and fill the cup a little over half way.
6. Let it sit. The water will soak into the marker, while will end up changing the color of the water. The longer you let the marker middles sit in the water, the more intense the watercolor paint will be.

So far, we have created red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple watercolor paints! We cannot wait to use them in some of our upcoming projects!

Below are some pictures of the watercolor making process!!

Maybe we'll be using these homemade watercolors in an upcoming project!