We talked about how you can make a print one time, ten times, or a million times. Printing is a great art process for an artist who needs to make a lot of something that are all the same.
Kindergarten did an awesome job with their first printing experience. The theme for our prints and frames were "favorite lines and shapes". The video below shows students in various stages of the printing process: 1) spreading paint on foam surface 2) Laying paper on top and "mowing the lawn" 3) pulling the print. We talked about how you can make a print one time, ten times, or a million times. Printing is a great art process for an artist who needs to make a lot of something that are all the same. I am very pleased with results of our kindergarten Rousseau projects, it's always exciting when a new idea turns out better than you even expected. After painting jungle plants with tints and shades of green students cut a hole for a creature from the "deep, dark jungle". Students started with two large eyes peering out from this space and then were free to add fur and other details to bring a particular animal to life. We also added vines, flowers and bugs to enhance the feeling of being deep in a crowded jungle.
These featured works were done by students in Mrs. Maul's kindergarten class. It is kindergarten students' turn to look at the work of Henri Rousseau. Today we began by painting jungle plants with tints and shades of green. A tint is a color with white added to make it lighter. A shade is a color with black added to make it darker.
We made our jungles look very crowded by overlapping leaf shapes. The "cloud" shape we left in the middle of the paper is for a surprise... we won't be adding that till next class. There is a hint of spring break fever in the air this week. Kindergarten is working on patterns of spring. They folded a paper to make four large stripes. Each stripe needed to contain a pattern that included spring things: bunnies, flowers, bugs, eggs, suns, snails, and butterflies. Each fold line had to have a different kind of line over it: wavy, straight, zig-zag, or dotted.
Here is a sampling of our kindergarten "We Are Artists!" self-portraits. Thanks to Cassie Stephens (art blogging superstar) for the inspiration. These will be included in our school art show next month as they showcase all the cutting, gluing, and painting skills we've been working on in kindergarten. The kids favorite part was making their art smock "as messy as Mrs. Heckendorf's apron".
As part of our whole-school Native American unit kindergarten looked at weaving made by the Navajo. This tribe traditionally lived in areas in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Students viewed images and discussed the shearing of a sheep (haircut!), carding wool, dying wool, and what a loom is. We looked at examples of Navajo weaving and noticed that there were always shapes with straight lines. I gave students one large diamond tracer, one small diamond tracer, and a ruler. They planned their own Navajo-inspired design. We limited our paint colors to those the Navajo might have been able to make: orange, red, brown, and yellow. The following week we outlined our designs with thin black lines. It takes an incredible amount of brush control for students this young to paint a straight thin line- and this year's group did a great job! I love all the unique designs that were created from three tools and five colors of paint. Most kindergarteners start the year drawing all the objects in a picture on the same ground line or floating in blank space. Through a variety of projects I try to encourage them to think about how they see things in the real world- that the size of objects can change as the move further away and that objects can overlap. This project introduces the concept of landscapes having a back, middle, and foreground. Students drew mountains and a sky in the background. Huge mountains look small because they are far away. Our castle is placed in the middle ground and is medium sized. The moat and plants are in the foreground. They look larger because they are closer. We even have a student walk a little way down the hall to test if this art trick is true is real life- the student looks smaller, but they didn't really shrink! In the picture there is also overlap. A castle overlaps the back and middle ground because it is in front of it. A horse or dragon might overlap the castle. Learning all these new things about showing space in your art is a lot more fun if there is a princess, a dragon, and a daring knight involved. Kindergarten will be enjoying Hey, Little Ant by Phillip and Hannah Hoose, as they work on their ant picnic collages. In the book, an ant argues with a child about why he should not be squished under a shoe. The ants in our collages have gotten past the shoe and are carrying away a picnic! We worked very hard on using an ABAB pattern of "over and under" to make the weaving on the side of our picnic baskets. Our thumbprints became the little ants who are carrying off pie, fruit, cookies, and pizza! This project let us print (thumb prints), weave, cut, glue, and draw. It has kept our little Kennedy worker artist ants busy indeed. Mrs. Luhman's class looked at work by painter Claude Monet. We talked about the kind of "smudgy" way he painted (Impressionism) and how he did hundreds of paintings of the same things to practice. One of his favorite things to paint was his garden in France. We looked at The Japanese Footbridge (1899) as inspiration for our own garden pond paintings. To paint like Monet, we used sponges to put in blends of blue, yellow, and green for plants. We used smaller brushes for details like the bridges and flowers. Our youngest artists were particularly excited about this work when I reminded them that Mother's Day is coming up and that most moms really like flowers. |
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