complementing Keith Haring

I love Keith Haring's artwork. 

It lends so well to elementary; the kids always love to learn about him. 

So, when third grade was learning about complementary colors... 

I decided to do a pop art version of Keith Haring's "bubble" people. 

We began by learning about Keith Haring's life and artwork style. I showed the students two quick clips from Sesame Street on the SMARTBoard - it's fun to show an artist's work in a place so many people recognize. It makes it a bit more "real" for the kids! You can find those clips here and here. :) 

We practiced drawing bubble people on white boards. The students worked with the kids at their tables - chose one person to model, and the rest drew. They rotated through like this til the end of class. {I showed them how to lightly draw a stick person first, then bubble around it and erase the stick. This works wonders for kids who can't just visualize the bubble!}

The next class, we divided our paper into four, drew a bubble person in a different position in each space, outlined in black, and painted each person with a primary watercolor. The next class we discussed complementary colors and painted the backgrounds with those!

trapped illusions

My fourth graders just finished this quarter-long project - whew! It was a lot of work, but had amazing results!

                   

We started by measuring out the "room". Each student had a 12x18 white paper, ruler, and pencil. I gave them the dimensions one at a time, and they used their outstanding ruler skills to draw it out. It was great to see how good they were at this, but even more awesome to see students being so kind to those who needed help. 

Once the room was drawn, we reviewed Keith Haring's 'bubble people', practiced a bit on white boards, and then drew the outline of a person in the middle box. They were supposed to make sure that its hands and feet were touching the side of the box to give the illusion that it was trapped on the back wall. 

Then we continued our study of value... students could pick any two colors to "checker" on each side, but within those, they needed to show value. The colors needed to get darker as they got closer to the black square. This created the illusion of depth! 

Look how cool they turned out:

Art teachers - what projects do you do with your students to show off their ruler skills?!