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!

Art Club Happenings: Operation Christmas Cards

In our most recent Art Club, we used recycled materials such as shiny wrapping paper, wallpaper, and scrap paper to create Christmas cards for the troops serving overseas and stationed in the states! We wanted to spread some hope, love, appreciation, and Christmas cheer to the men and women who are serving our country! Our cards will be sent to those deployed during the holidays to help boost their morale and spirit!

Operation Christmas Cards is a fantastic organization that sends cards to US soldiers who are currently deployed. Miss M will be sending the art club cards to their head quarters in Massachusetts  where they will send the cards out overseas. This year, they are hoping to send over 175,000 cards to our troops! The Art Club created over 60 beautiful, homemade cards!

Here are some examples of student made cards and envelopes (grades 4-8):

If you would like to learn more about Operation Christmas Cards, you can check out their website: operationchristmascard.org

Art Club Happenings: Macchias

The first session of art club is winding down! The theme of this session was "recycled art" and students learned that artists can use different recycled materials to create art! We used a variety of materials including coffee filters, plastic bottles, old magazines, and wallpaper!

For our first project we learned about glass artists, Dale Chihuly. Using coffee filters, markers, plastic cups, rubber bands, and liquid-spray starch, we created macchias in the style of the contemporary artist. These were super colorful and organic.

We took glued our macchias together to create two beautiful assemblages! Here are the two assemblages that are located outside of the art room!

Nice work!

3rd Grade Sea Turtles

For their first project third graders learned about Sea Turtles and how that species is an endangered species. Many artists create art to draw awareness to different causes that are important to them.

For our project, we create bright and colorful Sea Turtles using chalk pastels and glue. We used the glue to trace the pencil lines of our turtles. When the glue dried, it served as a border for our messy, but beautiful, chalk pastels! We discussed the techniques of blending and how to create highlights and shadows using this medium!

Here are a few examples of the third grade work!

Awesome job!

PreK: The Silly Pumpkin Patch

PreK created silly pumpkin faces just in time for Halloween! 

We mixed two primary colors, red and yellow paint, to make orange color of our pumpkins! 

We practiced cutting out all of the parts of our Jack-O-Lanterns! We loved making silly faces!

Here is our Silly Pumpkin Patch!

This project was so much fun! Happy Halloween!!

Kindergarten: Jumping into Kandinsky

In Kindergarten this year we are jumping into art by looking at and talking about famous artwork. We will be looking at videos that animate the art, so it literally looks like you art in the work!

For our first project we looked at Wassily Kandinsky's abstract art. Kandinsky loved to paint colors, shapes, and lines. He was inspired by music. We created a tissue paper collage, learned about different types of lines, and added shapes in our artwork all while listening to Beethoven and other classical music... something that inspire different music!

We watched this video and jumped into the painting, an animation of Kandinsky's art.

Our artwork came out so bright, bold, and colorful! Here are some student examples!

Great job Kindergarten!!

5th Grade: What Makes Me Scream!

5th graders studied the famous artwork, The Scream, by Edvard Munch! We talked about the reasoning behind Munch's painting, the emotion one can feel when they want to scream, and reasons why sometimes we might feel the need to scream!

  We used watercolors to paint our artwork. Some reasons students feel like screaming is for ice cream, aliens, bees, pizza, or even Tom Brady!Here are some examples of the student artwork:

These paintings are a real scream!

1st Grade Jim Dine Pop Art Hearts

Art work is starting to pop up in the hallways of SJV!

Here is some colorful and bright oil pastel work done by the 1st graders. We were inspired by contemporary artist, Jim Dine. Dine creates paintings and sculptures using hearts as the subject matter. We all agreed that his work was positive, fun, and beautiful! We also separated our background and hearts using warm and cool colors!

Here are some examples of the student's work:

 

Great work first grade!