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... :)

wild rhythm...

Fifth graders began this lesson by talking about Andy Goldsworthy and his temporary nature artworks. After talking about visual RHYTHM, comparing it to music, and finding the ways that Goldsworthy used rhythm in his artworks... artists practiced creating visual rhythms as a group using craft supplies (like popsicle sticks, seeds, wood shapes, beads, etc). We took pictures of these temporary artworks, and then artists filled out an Artist Statement describing what they did and how they showed RHYTHM.

Then we started our final challenge... WILD RHYTHM!

The goals were this: create a piece of artwork using the drawing and/or collage centers that demonstrates VISUAL RHYTHM. They were reminded to think about all of the Elements of Art that we discussed in our last project - especially focusing on SPACE.

Check out the amazing projects:

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!

we've got rhythm...

Fifth graders are working hard learning about the different principles of art this year, so for Rhythm/Movement we talked about Andy Goldsworthy. He is a British sculptor and photographer who uses the environment as his inspiration and materials! He has a unique way of showing rhythm and movement through his arches, circles, spirals and stacks. Check out some of his amazing artwork here!

Unfortunately it was too cold out for us to do the same; but, we watched a slideshow of his artworks, and then used random art collage materials to create our very own temporary art as a team.

This group of fifth graders is especially social... so working in groups had the potential to get out of control. They took the "no talking" challenge extremely seriously though... how could a group of three or four fifth graders build a temporary artwork showing rhythm, movement, and good composition without talking?!

This group sketched ideas, and wrote notes
to communicate about their design

They were more than up for the challenge... and they rocked it!