brain works...

Sixth graders are focusing their inspiration on World Facts and History this year... so for this project, we talked about the Eastern and Western Hemisphere's of the world and the theory that they mirror the Right and Left sides of the brain in the way that they function, their attitudes, and their experiences. We explored the different functions of the two sides of the brain, and compared them to the elements of art. Then, we got to work on our brain art!

Artists were to design the left side of the brain using collage, sharpies, and charcoal pencils to show "left brain" functions... they were able to explore blending and value through the use of the charcoal pencils, and add a little dimension to that side. 

For the right side, the watercolor studio was opened! Artists practiced on ATC's before doing a wash of color on the right brain.

Then they were to use their imagination to find images in the dried watercolor... like seeing objects in the clouds... and add details and outlines to those things. A very "Right Brain" activity! 

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... :)

express yourself...

Paulding Elementary Fourth Graders are spending the year learning about different styles of art!

We started out with Fauvism, and this project brought us up close and personal with Expressionism...

The fabulous fourth graders studied lots of different examples of expressionistic artwork,

but looked a little closer at Edvard Munch's "The Scream". 

We created our own Expressionism Paintings by first drawing the main outlines 

of the bridge, water, and sky on our paper. The paper started with a hole in the bottom right for the students face to fit in, so we had to talk about overlapping, and how the body and head should look like it was in front of the bridge and water. 

Some classes had time to glue yarn down over their lines to add some texture to their final paintings!

The fourth graders were supposed to have an emotion that they wanted to portray in mind before they started drawing, so that their lines and colors were expressive of that feeling.

Aren't these amazing?! 

Can you guess the emotions?