art ed digested

These are some quick blurbs about my favorite lessons to teach, if you’d like more information, please contact me!

Andy Goldsworthy Inspired Assemblages

Every student at Kingsley Montessori School, from toddler to Sixth grader, had the opportunity to create a piece of Land Art, inspired by the art of Andy Goldsworthy. Classroom teachers also participated in this outdoor art-making activity, using only natural materials to create a fleeting group assemblage on the Commonwealth Mall and the Esplanade. Students first organized natural materials in the environment into like piles of sticks, leaves, stones, moss etc. They then decided collaboratively how to arrange the objects they had collected into a piece of art. We recorded these compositions with photography to be published in a calendar.

Abstracted Portrait Stained Glass Window

The sixth grade began their year with a self-portrait study, which became their inspiration for the sixth grade auction piece, a stained glass panel in the style of Marc Chagall. Students began the project creating blind contour sketches of their face, and then transferred them to plexiglass using leading and glass paints.

Acrylic Glaze Paintings

Fifth and Sixth year students chose an image to translate into painting medium, and then created enlarged sketches to fill the area of their canvas in a compositionally interesting way. They then began an under-painting, which is the process of laying on washes of very thin paint to plan areas of color, highlight and shadow. Next, they will used a technique called Glazing, where students apply many layers of thinned paint to build color, shading, texture, and the illusion of form.

Gargoyle Face Bas-Relief

In architecture, gargoyles are spouts that help direct rainwater away from the foundation of a building. They are often ornately carved figures that add decoration to the building. Second grade students studied the history of gargoyles and the expressions they could make using their own face. They sculpted gargoyles out of flattened balls of clay, then burnished and painted them with metallic luster for a weathered effect.

Giacometti Figurative Sculptures

As an introduction to figurative sculpture, third grade students looked at Giacometti’s elongated figures and compared them with Botero’s robust sculptures. We then talked about poses and movement as students modeled for each other and warmed up with quick gesture drawings of each other. They then wrapped wire and tinfoil to build an armature for their plaster sculptures. Students built upon these armatures with layers of plaster gauze to create texture and heft, then carefully painted their figures in metallic shades as though they were cast out of metal.

Artist-Inspired Masks

Fourth grade students researched the works of many artists to inspire their plaster masks. First students chose a particular work of art or artist and translated it into a design for a mask, along with a written explanation of their thought process. After forming a plaster base, students developed their ideas with paint and other mixed media material. We displayed our masks as a puzzle, asking the viewer to match the mask with the piece of art or artist it was based upon.

Stop-Motion Animation Unit

Third grade students completed a challenging unit following the process of stop-motion animation from the first stages of creating backdrops and puppets to animate, choreographing original dance moves for their puppet to perform, choosing their own soundtrack, filming a multitude of individual frames, to the completed product including digital video editing and special effects.

Pillow Portraits

Fourth year students studied self-portraiture to first create a sketch of themselves using mirrors. Then students enlarged and transferred their self-portraits to fabric with markers, textile paint, mixed fabric media and sewing techniques to create a life sized three-dimensional textile self-portrait.

Aborigine Dreamtime Paintings

Kindergarten students learned about different methods of storytelling. One such method is through images, used by the Aboriginal people of Australia. Students experimented with symbolic language using traditional Aboriginal symbols and created their own symbols to tell a story set in the deserts of Australia.

Leaf Mobiles

Students created leaf mobiles based on the work of Alexander Calder. They observed photographs of various mobiles, discussed how they moved, what they would be constructed from and how they would balance. In conjunction with the Preschool Science curriculum, we studied the different types of leaves and parts of a leaf as our subject for the mobiles. 3 & 4 year old students created paper leaves using stencils and colorful tissue paper. They practiced their cutting techniques and used collage to decorate their designs. Kindergarten students created their leaves using colorful wire and cellophane. The end result was a beautiful ‘Fall’ mobile displayed in the classroom.

The Big Bang! Unit

After listening to musical compositions inspired by the Big Bang, First and Second year students composed, performed, and recorded their own unique musical pieces using percussion instruments to create an aural Big Bang. Then, using their music piece as a source, students created paintings imagining a visual representation of the Big Bang.

Clay Whistles

Did you know that clay makes music? Our ocarinas can! The ocarina is a very old type of instrument dating back approximately 12,000 years from both Chinese and Meso-American cultures. With some careful construction, fourth grade students found, that when shaped correctly, they can make music using only a ball of clay. Each student made two pinch pots and joined them to make the hollow body of their whistle. They then added a cylinder for a mouthpiece and an opening for the air to escape at just the right angle to make their whistles sing. Students decorated their ocarinas with glazes in wild patterns and colors.

Clay Dwelling

Use your imagination and construct a place where someone or something can live. Fifth and sixth grade students were given a block of clay and the task of creating a clay dwelling. Their habitats are traditional and non-traditional, real and imagined, as they brought their own inventive minds to the task.

Rubber Band Block Prints

Working with abstraction, repetition, line, and color, Third grade students began this printing project by gluing rubber band strips to cardboard to create printing blocks. The next class students used brayers, and many colors of paint and paper to create their beautifully textured prints.

Rousseau-Inspired Jungle

Did you know that Rousseau, who is famous for his lavish jungle scene paintings, never really went to the jungle? First grade students learned how Rousseau researched and imagined his verdant jungle paintings, and created their own researched an imagined jungle landscapes using oil pastel.

Matisse Paper Cut

When the painter Matisse began to grow old, painting became more difficult for him and he turned to paper collage. Inspired by Jazz music and the colors of the circus, Matisse created bold designs from cut paper. First grade students then created abstracted images using cut paper while listening to experimental Jazz music. They imagined titles for each of their classmates’ compositions and discussed the contrasting images that could be seen in the finished collages.

Kandinsky Watercolor Abstraction

First grade students learned about Abstract Expressionism, and discussed how Wassily Kandinsky could capture emotion using non-objective shape, line and color. The students then began to free-form draw straight onto their canvasses with permanent marker while listening to instrumental music, afterwards adding color blocks of watercolor paint. The first graders paid special attention to color mixing, keeping their colors highly pigmented and saturated, and laying analogous hues next to another.

Continuous Line Watercolor Resist

Third grade students learned the tricky process of blind-contour continuous line drawing, which forces the artist to observe more carefully through looking only at the object to be drawn, and never down at the picture you are drawing until its completion. In addition to this, these drawings were created using only one continuous serpentine line looping back around on itself to create the lines and shapes observed by the artist.

Portrait Triptych

Fourth grade students explored the idea of multiple images, when asked to use different two-dimensional media to play with the contours of their face to create three distinct but similar self-portraits that colorfully reflect the personality of the artist behind them.

Distorted, Xeroxed Portrait

Fifth and sixth grade students were challenged to create an abstraction, using only images of their face, copied in different tones and sizes. Some chose to systematically break their face into blocks, while some chose more organic shapes and placement to abstract the features of their face.

Warm/Cool Watercolor Study

Fifth and sixth grade students explored the technique of shading using warm and cool colors. This technique, popularized by the Impressionist art movement, uses blues, greens and purples to suggest an area in shadow, and yellows, oranges, and reds to evoke the feeling of an area of highlight. By using this method, hues are seen as more saturated and lively, and shading becomes more close to realistic lighting situations.

Packaging Tape Sculptures

Based on the work of street artist Mark Jenkins, Upper Elementary students worked cooperatively to create a life-size cast figurative sculpture using saran wrap and clear packaging tape. Student artists discussed the purpose of street art, and ownership of artwork when created in a group setting.