music and harmony...

5th graders got introduced to the Watercolor Studio for this project! They began by making six different Artist Trading Cards practicing several watercolor techniques - wet on dry marks, wet on wet washes and blending, crayon resist, salt, rubbing alcohol, and pen and ink designs.

Then we discussed HARMONY as a Principle of Art. We compared Harmony in Art to Harmony in Music! We also explored several different ways to use COLOR as harmony in their artwork, such as warm/cool colors, analogous, triadic, and split complementary!

For this challenge, Artists were to create a piece of artwork using the drawing, collage, and/or watercolor studios that showed HARMONY, with a theme of MUSIC. We also talked about how to tie in the principle of Rhythm and all of the elements from our previous lessons. I'm so impressed with their solutions... :)

music & harmony...

One of the last principals of art that the 5th grade students focused on this year was Harmony.

This is such a hard one to explain... but after looking at a lot of examples, and comparing it to the music classroom vocabulary (which they know very well thanks to Mrs. Sloan) the connection was made!  

Artists were able to use the TAB centers for this project... so their goal was to create an artwork that showed Harmony, using the theme of Music. I love how these turned out! 

artist trading cards...

Through my Pinterest-ing, I've found a ton of information on Artist Trading Cards and was so excited to try it out this year with the 3rd graders! Artist Trading Cards are 2.5" x 3.5" artworks that can be traded with any other artist in the world... 

We decided to make Mixed Media Self Portraits. We studied a lot of different art techniques when making these. We began by talking about harmony and painting our paper using colors we thought looked good together using a watercolor wash. 

Then we learned about rhythm in art, and made white prints on top of our colored paper using Styrofoam printing plates that we drew our own rhythmic design on. 

We then used collage to create our clothing… for this part we watched a really cool video online about a four year old girl in Ohio, nicknamed Mayhem, that designs clothes out of paper! Her designs have become so popular through her mom’s Instagram account, that she’s been featured on The Ellen Show and she is now helping J. Crew design a kid’s clothing collection! You can find her online by searching “Fashion by Mayhem” - she was our inspiration! 

Lastly, we painted the skin and hair details, trying hard to mix and match colors to show our own uniqueness the best we could. We did not include facial features because we were hoping to keep an abstract-ness to the portraits. Didn't they turn out so cute! 

After they were done, we signed the backs and sent them off to Mrs Hahn's 4th grade artists in Rogers Minnesota! And my artists were thrilled to receive this back soon after: 

Thank you Hassan Elementary School - we love our new artworks!

calder scuptures...

Third graders learned about Alexander Calder and his wire sculptures!

We then created patterns and designs on small cardstock pieces.

Each student had five pieces, and they were supposed to focus on 

making each pattern different, 

while still having an 

element of harmony throughout their 5 designs. 

Students learned that they could repeat one element 

(a line, a color, or a shape) in each of their designs to create this harmony.

Then we had to do some more problem solving... 

the kiddos could choose as many pieces of straw as they wanted, 

and they had to cut, glue, and assemble the straws and design cards

together to make a sculpture. The only rules were that the final sculpture

had to be just that.... a sculpture. Three-dimensional, not laying flat on their tables. 

This was not an easy task with the materials 

at hand, but the students shined! 

Check out some of the amazing sculptures our third graders built:

 (so proud!)