Bird Masks

The weather outside has been delightful! Crocuses have been blooming and birds are singing their hearts out in disbelief! This unseasonably warm spring made it impossible for me to resist doing a bird lesson with my Kindergarten artists! The two day project started with a brief discussion of masks from other cultures such as African Yoruba masks, traditional Chinese theater masks, and South American Aztec warrior masks. We brainstormed different reasons why people may wear a mask. Most students related to the idea of masks as a means of disguise for Halloween festivities, but we also talked about se masks that are used for safety by doctors and sports players.

These masks we're made from half of a small paper dessert plate and a large wooden craft stick. The students decorated their masks form with tissue paper and feather. Here is one of my Kindergarten classes modeling their creations.

Hallway Display Idea for Delicious Pastel Desserts

Wayne Thiebaud dessert cakes have become a consistent and popular lesson in many art teacher repertoires. I have taught this lesson at the past three schools I have worked at and it always ends up becoming a slam dunk lesson that students both love and learn a lot from. This year, I chose to share this lesson with my 4th graders who are learning about 3-D geometric shapes in their math class. I detailed this lesson before on Coral vs. Salmon and you can read about my instructional process for the lesson here. In fact, my write-up of this lesson was my very first blog post back in 2009! I'm pretty sure the idea for this lesson came from a 2009 Arts & Activities of SchoolArts article, but I could not find it in my archives.

I put a fresh spin on this lesson in the way I displayed the student art work. I came up with the simple and fun idea of creating bakery awnings over each class's grouping of cakes. I asked the students to come up with a pretend alliterative name for their bakeries. They used their classroom teacher's name as a jumping off point. The store names the students came up with were "Mr. DeHaan's Delicious Desserts", "Mrs. Munn's Magnificient Munchables", "Mrs. Anderson's Appetizing Entrees", and "Mrs. Haggerty's Home-Made Honeycakes." I am really pleased with how the display turned out and it was super easy to put together. I cut a bunch of U-shaped pieces from scrap pieces of brightly colored paper. I glued them together and used half of a styrofoam egg carton taped to the wall to make the awnings pop out from the wall at an angle.

Original Music in the Art Room? Yes please!

[slideshow]

A few weeks ago my second graders and I began a journey into the atomized world of French Pointillist paintings by George Seurat. What I didn't anticipate is that our journey bravely blazed a new trail that involved writing and performing an original song together! Yes, ladies and gentleman, the talented 2nd graders I get to see on a daily basis composed an original song all about George Seurat.

It all started  a few years back when I was completing a long-term sub for an amazing art teacher on maternity leave. One of the lessons she left for me to complete was titled Dot, Dot, Seurat! Since then, I have seen similar lessons labeled with the same title, I suppose because it is such an easy way to help students remember through rhyme that the paintings of George Seurat can be identified by the use of lots of dots.

I taught  this lesson at three different schools so far, and this was the first time the rhyme really took the class to a new, totally new musical place. One of the students was repeating the title of the lesson on the board while he worked on his painting, "Dot, Dot George, Seurat! and then he added "likes to paint in dots a lot!" From there, the rhyming spread like wildfire. I was so tickled by the students' interest and impressed by the students rhyme ideas I started jotting their lines down on the board. I shared this story with my other three 2nd grade classes and they helped to add on to the song as well.

On the last day of the Seurat lesson, I had the lyrics the students produced typed out neatly and we performed and recorded our song on my iPhone. I added a drum track and a piano lick using a few handy-dandy iPhone apps. The final cut of our musical track is hosted on Vimeo and posted below. Do you think George Seurat would dig this song? I do. It was so pleasant to be blown away by the serendipitous creativity of a second grader's response to a new artist. I am also infinitely tickled to have technology that helped me to propel this student's bright idea to another level.

http://vimeo.com/37468634

Funky Presidential Portraits

Tomorrow morning when students enter the school they will be welcomed by a new display of Presidential Portraits greeting them. I'm hoping this will add a spark to a Monday that most school's have off for vacation. I found the lesson plan for this project in the January 2012 edition of Arts & Activities. There is a link to the article here that explains the basic material layering process that helps to achieve the end result. The art teacher responsible for this lesson is Cheryl Crumpecker is a K-3 art teacher at St. Paul's Episcopal Day School in Kansas City, Mo. She used this lesson to compare the traditional portrait style of Gilbert Stuart and pop artist, Peter Max, but I decided to just focus on Max's unique painting style, drawing on the right side of the brain, line quality, and color mixing. I used heavyweight card stock for the drawing/painting and found some acetate transparencies to use for the Sharpie line drawings. I was hesitant about following the portion of Cheryl's directions that asked the students to draw their president UPSIDE DOWN. I decided to take a risk and believe in the extraordinary abilities of my 5th graders and ended up being beyond pleasantly surprised.

On the second day of the lesson before we began painting, I showed students a brief video of a recent story the CBS Morning Show did on Peter Max and his patriotic style. I used this video. It was a good way to show students how popular and iconic  Max's work is. He has painted on a lot of important things such as jumbo jet airliners and even the White House lawn during the Reagan era. It also gives students a glimpse of how Max uses his paint, painting quickly, mixing a bunch of bright colors on one brush (usually an art room no no!), and painting a background of block colors.

I took a lot of pictures because I was so excited about the results so I will inserting them all as a slideshow.

Daruma Dolls

Before I landed my fabulous new job as an art teacher of some of the most amazing human beings in Pennsylvania, I was working as the Arts & Education Director with Young Audiences of Western New York. I learned about Daruma dolls from one of the extraordinary teaching artists I worked with at this job, Jen Russo. Jen was making Daruma sculptures with at an after-school program for one of the residency programs I coordinated. I had never heard of a Daruma Doll before and as soon as Jen explained the concept behind the doll to me I was instantly intrigued and inspired. In addition to Jen's guidance, I found a few other super online resources to learn more about Darumas such as this informative Daruma PDF put out by the Allen Memorial Art Museum with Oberlin University.

In short, a Daruma is a Japanese sphere-shaped papier mache doll with a red painted body and a white face without pupils!  Daruma dolls represent Bodhidharma, a Zen monk who meditated for almost 9 years while sitting in a meditative posture for so long that his legs were of no use anymore. We compared and contrasted the way we celebrate the New Year with the Japanese tradition of the Daruma doll. The students drew some very interesting parallels!

Throughout the year, but traditionally on New Year's Day, one makes a wish or sets a goal and paints one black pupil onto the Daruma doll. When the goal is reached or the wish comes true one then paints on the second pupil and dispose the doll on the following New Year's Day.

The project began with a full day of Plaster of Paris which the students loved working with. Luckily, the art teacher who was at my school before me bought several boxes of the Plaster of Paris rolls. I prepped for this sculptural building day by cutting the plaster into 2" x 4' inch strips and by blowing up nearly 100 balloons! (My boyfriend Matt was there to help for this, thank goodness!) We used a piece of 9' x 6' manilla paper folded into a bracelet-like ring at the Daruma's base. The students taped this ring to the bottom of the balloon. I also cut tiny triangle pieces of card stock that the students taped onto the balloon for the nose.

On the second day, we started talking about some of the symbols that are typically painted onto the Daruma's face and body. I provided students with variety of colors for the paints. I did not make them stick to the traditional red color as I thought it would be cool for the students to be expressive with color rather than formulaic. I showed the students how to mix a flesh tone to match the traditional Daruma.

 

 



I got out the smallest paint brushes I had for the detailed thin lines on the Daruma face and the students practiced using a light, delicate brush stroke to achieve different kinds of line quality. I printed out several copies of Japanese word symbols so students could pick words that relate to their New Year's goal to use in their Daruma decoration.

When the students were finished painting their Daruma's exterior, they were allowed to use a Sharpee to write their goal for 2012 on the bottom of their Daruma and paint one of the eyes in. I really wanted to peek and see what their goals were, but I promised them that I wouldn't look because their goal may be personal.

The hallway display of the 5th grade Daruma's has created quite a stir with students and other teachers. Many passers by are curious why the Darumas only have one eye. The display is located just outside the art room and I have heard more than one 5th grader proudly explaining the Japanese tradition to students in other grade levels. I was happy to hear this!

Diatoms: A Study In Radial Symmetry

 

How do artists use nature as a basis to inspire artistic design?

What are diatoms, where can they be found in local ecosystems, and how are they a useful tool for both artists and ecologists?

For the past few weeks, my 5th graders and I have been on a super interesting journey into the microscopic, yet gorgeous world of diatoms. If you don't know what a diatom is, don't feel discouraged! I had no idea what a diatom was either until I discovered the amazing bio drawings of Ernst Haeckel just last year. In short, diatoms are microscopic, single-celled organisms that live in aquatic environments. Diatoms are encased in beautiful, iridescent cases that grow in elaborate bilateral and radially symmetrical shapes. Plant and animal cells are a major part of the 5th grade curriculum that the students were covering this Fall, so the choice the pair watercolor painting techniques with diatoms ended up being a smash hit!

 

Objectives: The students will…

·      understand how the invention of the compound lens microscope advanced the field of botanical drawing and allowed artists and scientists to view the microscopic structural details of objects from nature.

·      relate 2-D design principals such as shape, repetition, and symmetry to the naturally occurring organic forms found in microscopic diatoms.

 

On the first day of our diatom unit, I placed a picture showcasing a variety of diatoms under a microscope on each table. As the students waited in their line outside of my door I told them they would have 2o seconds to examine the photograph, talk with their table mates, and come up with an idea of what they thought was depicted in the photo.  The student guesses ranged from "pillows from Pier1 Imports" to Willy Wonka candy, to bacteria. I gave a brief overview of what diatoms are, that they are found in aquatic environments, that they evolved in the Jurassic Period, and that they are used in several household products such as toothpaste! After the introduction, I explained to students that we were going to do our best to draw very large-scale. (We used 18 X 24 inch paper) We were going to take something microscopic and enlarge its scale by 10,000! I demonstrated how to draw the diatom by looking for familiar shapes like triangles and circles and patterns. I emphasized starting on the inside of the form and working out since most of the diatoms have radial symmetry. I stressed drawing so large that the diatom goes off part of the page. I also encouraged students to spice up their composition by having some of the diatom forms overlap. After the students were satisfied with their drawing they  went over the lines with black acrylic paint.

On day two of the diatom unit, I showed students how to paint using the wet on wet watercolor technique. The classes went crazy over this new skill! They loved how the paints "exploded" when they hit the page and the watery result of this technique worked well conceptually for the diatom's watery environment.

The students got very experimental with the watercolor painting. One student even recalled the splatter technique used in Japanese suminagashi paper making that we used a few projects back and begin to try this method with watercolor paints. He got some really interesting results which inspired other students to give it a try. I like to make a big deal over connections like this that the students make. I told him he was really thinking like an artist -- being innovative within the parameters to create a new result.

It took one additional 45 minute class for the students to finish their diatoms. The students were so excited about this project that they got really into coming up with names for our exhibit. In the end it was a toss-up between a lot of really cool ideas including "Jingle Cells," and "Tie-Diatoms." Ultimately, we decided to go with "Deck the Halls with Diatoms." Did I mention what an extraordinary group of 5th graders I have the pleasure of working with each day? This project was a boat-load of fun.