Warm and Cool Colors "Imagination" Lesson

Hello, all! 

I promised some more lesson posts, and I'm starting with this one! I'm loving how these turned out. If you want to try this with your kids or students, keep reading!

SUPPLIES:

- tempera paints in a variety of colors

- something for the paint to go in - we used egg cartons

- multicultural construction paper (9 x 12 cut in half sheets)

- green paper

- Large (11 x 17) white paper and smaller (9 x 12) paper

- brushes, water cups

LESSON:

1.) Show an example that you've made of this pieces. Talk a little about conceptual illustration. Is this a picture that could really happen, or is someone using their imagination to create it? You could also show some surrealistic or conceptual illustration by other artists. Ask the kids what they think your piece is trying to "say". Why did you choose to have flowers growing out of your head? I got some interesting answers from my students: "It's about using your imagination", "Our minds are blooming", etc. They got it.

2.) Have a little talk about warm and cool colors...review them. They have a choice of having a warm background with cool flowers, or cool background with warm flowers - for contrast. Have them paint their background on the big sheet of white - just designs and patterns covering the whole paper. The smaller white sheet is to paint the flowers. They should also cover their smaller flower sheet in paint, since they will cut their flowers out of this. 

3.) They can then make stems and leaves out of the green paper, and cut out flower shapes out of their smaller painted paper. 

4.) We did a self-portrait lesson right before this lesson, so the kids already knew how to set up their guidelines for drawing their faces. They should choose their skin color out of a stack of the multicultural construction paper, and then draw a self-portrait on it. They can draw in pencil and trace in pen, and color in lips, hair and eye colors. 

5.) Glue everything together on the background paper! This whole process took us about 3, 45 minute sessions. And as always, some kids go through it super quickly, some very slowly, so plan other things for early finishers. But you knew that. Have fun!!

First Grade Self Portraits

I've been at Dos Rios/Two Rivers Elementary in Springfield all this week and last. We're making projects to take home, and some to sell at the Springfield First Friday Art Walk in May! This was their project that they were able to take home to their families: Self Portraits! For the older kids (grades 2-5) I did a more involved lesson on proportions of the face, colored with sharpie and tissue paper.... read that lesson by clicking here.  For the Kinders and first graders, we did this version you see in the pictures.  Read on to see how we did this lesson!

Supplies:

• Multicultural construction paper, cut in 6 x 9" sheets. 

• black sharpies

• colored pencils

• background colored construction paper, 9x12"

• Small-ish rectangles of pattern paper (we used both wrapping paper and contact paper)

• construction paper hair colors, cut into smaller pieces...half or quarter sheets. 

• glue sticks

• scissors

This can be done in 2, 30-minute sessions, or one longer one. 

• Day 1: Teach them suuuuper basic proportions of the face.  Just show that the eyes go in the middle of the face, and show some ways to draw eyes, noses and lips. The first day, just draw the faces on the multicultural skin color papers, trace drawings with sharpie, and add some colored eyes (and whites of the eyes!) lips, and cheeks with colored pencils. 

• Day 2: Put it all together: cut a "shirt" rainbow shape out of the patterned paper, cut out the faces, add torn paper for the hair. Glue, glue glue. Then watch the cuteness happen. Love these!!

Collaborative Mural Project for Kids

One of the things I've learned lately about teaching, is that the better I lay out expectations FIRST, the better everything goes afterwards with students.  It sounds obvious, but it's so key.  Anyway, one of my expectations when doing a school-wide mural with kids, is TEAMWORK and COLLABORATION. Those are the biggies.  Kids are expected to work together on the mural, and respect each other's ideas and contributions, for it all to come together. They might not get to paint the "coolest" or "best" part, or at least not on their own.  It's everyone contributing to the whole, that makes it look nice in the end. 

So to drive this point home, this was the first project I did with my most recent group of students. A collaborative mural....but in paper!  This school's mission is about these 5 "Heart Skills", as they call them: Teamwork, Empathy, Honor, Accountability and Respect.  Here's how we did this:

1.) First day: I had every student k-5 draw their self portrait on a 4.5 x 4.5" square. 

2.) After that, if kids finished early, they were allowed to go over to our big butcher paper and paint designs with tempera around the words I had written in black paint. 

3.) I glued every kid's self portrait down around the words.  The kid's designs and colors peek through as the background.  

** If I were to do this over again, I would have made it an even bigger piece of paper so that we could spread the portraits out a little more, and see more of the painting underneath.

This is SO worth it to do with kids.  This is getting them ready to work TOGETHER, and turns out ridiculously cute and awesome. Also, nice enough to laminate or mount and hang somewhere as a mural in it's own right!

Happy paper mural-ing!

Corie

Self Portraits With Borders!

I just LOVED how these self portraits came out.  One of my favorite parts of doing an extended residency at a school, rather than a quick one day lesson or workshop, is the fact that there is so much more time to complete a project. These kids learned the proportions of the face, traced their portraits in sharpie, and colored them with bleeding art tissue paper all in one 45 minute session. (Check out the post on how to do that part here).  We let these dry, then the next day, were able to add and decorate these borders.  Sometimes it's worth it to just put out a bunch of fun materials that kids don't get to use very often, and see what happens. For our border sessions, I put out sequins, glitter (which I - along with every other teacher on the planet - have a love/hate relationship with), stamps, and markers. I told them they needed their names on them, but the rest was up to them to decorate. Oh man, those 2 days we finished this project, I could rest assured that each child was carrying glitter wherever they went just like the viciously infectious colds and flus going around. That stuff was EVERYWHERE. A kind teacher brought in a broom for me, and I (mostly) was able to take care of it. It was the chunky kind, so it sweeps. Just TRY to get the fine stuff off of something. I dare you. We had a great time with these. Below are a sampling of kids grades 2-5. 

Enjoy, and go bravely forward with glittering!

 

Paul Klee Inspired Self Portrait Lesson

Art Teachers loooove to do self portraits with kids.  This was a cool twist on the self portrait AND it involves art appreciation AND is much easier to clean up and set up than paint.  Perfect! Read on if you wanna do it too. 

You will need:

- white paper (duh)

- sharpies

- newspapers or something to protect desks from said sharpies

- bleeding art tissue paper, cut into small squares (craft stores)

- 1 or 2 spray bottle(s)

Lesson:

1.) Introduce Paul Klee...show slideshow of his work (especially ones with the colored squares).  Talk about how he was very interested in color theory - how colors relate to other colors around them. Ask kids to describe some of his paintings or share what they observed.

2.) Show how to draw a face in correct proportions. Have kids follow along with you as you draw on the board. They will draw all their guide lines in pencil. I learned about proportions of the face back in middle school and it's stuck with me. Here's a great, simple guide. 

3.) Once they have their guidelines, students trace over ONLY their features and add details in sharpie. Make sure they're not tracing their guide lines. They don't really need to erase their pencil lines, because  once the paper gets wet, they disappear. Emphasize that all the details unique to them will be what makes their portrait look like them: freckles, how they part their hair, face shape, etc. 

4.) Pass out tissue squares and have them lay them all out how they want them, thinking about Paul Klee and his experiments with color relationships. Go around and spray each piece with water once kids have them all laid out. After a couple minutes, take off tissue paper and let dry. So cute, right??

These were done by 3rd graders: