what's cookin?

My goodness. We have several weeks until our annual Celebration of Art and my classroom is bursting with projects. Usually I do the same project with each of the classes from a particular grade level. However, I have 4 different projects going on with my seven 5th grade classes. Stuff is everywhere...

These projects are inspired by contemporary artists and the lessons previously done by art teachers that I follow online. I will go into more detail when the projects are done, but here's a sneak peek.

Stay tuned. We'll see how all these come together by the end of the week. 

pretty as a pecoff.

More specifically, the landscape paintings that San Diego's own Grant Pecoff has been making for the last several years. I love the flow and wobble that are present in many of his images. His use of color is quite electric, too.

I thought his work would make for an interesting contrast to the more abstract artists the 2nd graders have been investigating in the last couple lessons.

Since he has done so many paintings of our home town, it was  easy to hook kids into the landscape subject. While looking at images from Grant's website, kids got excited by seeing Balboa Park, the Coronado Bridge, and downtown San Diego. I made sure to emphasize that while these things were easy to recognize in the paintings, Grant did not make them look super realistic. I pointed out how he distorted shapes, his lines were wavy and he was playful with color. This is a good way for me to disarm those of the kiddos who get frustrated when their work doesn't look "perfect". Neither does Pecoff's, and that is what makes it more interesting and beautiful.

I used Grant's work to revisit  the concept of warm and cool colors in art and how you can play with the contrast of those colors to make different parts of a drawing stand out. I decided to execute this project with chalk pastels on black paper and broke the activity up into 2 parts. First, we drew a landscape based on one of Grant's images in pencil on the paper and then added chalk pastels in between the lines. We  attempted to leave space between some areas to create the contour lines that are present throughout Pecoff's images.

The drawing portion was a directed exercise, as we worked through the different parts of his composition together. The color part was more independent. The main guide line in the color part was to only use warm or cool colors in the different parts of the composition. I did model using the pastels on my easel to emphasize key technical points to using the potentially messy medium. I modeled using the end of the pastel for small areas and the side for large ones. I showed them the difference between leaving the pastel rough and blending it smooth with your finger. The biggest one for me was to model not resting your hand or arm on an area that you have already colored. I love going into a drawing I have done with the class before and intentionally messing it up by doing this. Some students are seriously dismayed that I have "ruined" something that had looked good. There is always audible signs of relief when I show them that these smudges can be fixed by going back over those areas.

Since I work with 9 different 2nd grade classes, I used a number of Pecoff's paintings as the inspiration for the different classes. I repeated a couple, but it has been nice to keep it so fresh for me to do over and over with each of the classes.

There have been some pretty fine results from this drawing activity. A lot of messy hands, arms, faces, and clothes, but all in all, it's been totally worth it to see so many interesting takes on Grant's work.

more mundane...

I was curious to see what our 5th graders would do with something like Supermundane's vocabulary of line, pattern, and color, so I let let them have at it.

The older students were just as impressed with the repetitive detail of super's images as the younger ones were. After mentioning that Super had been written about as "the king of the repetitive doodle", we discussed what doodling actually was. Some interesting repsonses to that question, as well as plenty of examples on the nametags students have in my classroom:)
Image construction was the same. The things that changed were the color of the support, the color of the sharpie marker, and the use of construction paper crayons for the other line work. Only 3 changes, but their visual impact was considerably large.

I enjoyed seeing some of the students taking on more elaborate base shapes to fill with patterns.

The drawings were also larger. We went from 9 x 12" to 12 x 15".

I changed the color of the support after seeing the below image that Supermundane created a couple of years ago. There is still a sense of depth in the image even though there isn't the stark contrast between black and colored lines like there is on a white support.

not just mundane...

Supermundane!

Rob Lowe (aka Supermundane) is a typographer, designer, illustrator, and all around creative guy living in London, England. He is also the creative director of a cool children's magazine called Anorak that I have always wanted to get for my kids, but have never actually pulled the trigger on. :)

His designs, type, and illustrations have a wonderful hand drawn quality to them. They ring of spontaneity. His manual creations served a an interesting contrast to the the computer generated work of Dante Terzigni who was the inspiration for the last project the 2nd graders completed.

Also, even though Supermundane's shapes are often flat, he like Dante, creates a bit of 3d space because he often pairs shapes outlined in black with shapes outlined in a lighter color. This contrast of dark to light sets the black shapes forward and the lighter ones behind them.

When we were looking at images from his website students identified that the compositions were often set into large, simple geometric shapes. These big shapes were not outlined, but stood out due to the lines in the image ending along the edges of the big shapes. Students also noticed that some shapes and lines burst out of the bigger shape to make the design a bit more interesting.

When we got started drawing, students drew out a large shape of their choice. I emphasized pressing lightly, so that the lines were there as a guide, but should not show up in the final drawing. I then modeled how to start with their Supermundane inspired "doodle". I started with a small shape and then continued to add onto and around it. I talked about the need to keep lines close together to give their drawings enough visual intensity. After getting about half way through  the big shapes with black marker, students were then allowed to switch to one or two more colors to add variety and space to their designs. 

Many students really cruised along with this project. Since students didn't really have to make their drawings "look like" anything real, a number of my students with high frustration level were really able to succeed. Some needed reinforcement to add more lines inside of patterns they had added, or to take their lines all the way to the edges of the large shape they were filling. 

remed.

I had 2 different grade levels switch on me this week and I hadn't "quite" finished preparing for the 5th grade lesson I was going to do later in the week, so....

I went through a number of art and design blogs I have bookmarked in the morning, so I could come up with something manageable for me, yet engaging and standards based for the gaggle of big kids that would inhabit my room in a few hours.

I came across the work of French artist Remed. I felt his work was an interesting contemporary take on abstraction of the human form. He works in a language pioneered in the 20th century by Picasso and the like, but in his hands it feels fresh and alive. Plus, he is a muralist and graffiti artist. The graffiti thing always gets the kids interested in what I'm talking about in the front of the room.

His works vary in size from small to monumental, depending on the type of surface and location.

I decided to focus on a few portraits he has done that include a heavy dose of pattern in them. One of the 5th grade standards is to identify and create a strong sense of unity in art. By emphasizing the use of pattern through shape and color, the 5th graders would be able to develop a stronger understanding of this principle of design.

Students had a choice of creating an image based on either the profile or full frontal compositions above. We used chalk pastels on black paper to get the boldness of color that is often found in Remed's work. We outlined the basic shapes with white chalk and then added detail elements with white as well. 

Once the contours where in, students were free to add colors of their choice. I demonstrated the need to keep your drawing hand off the paper to keep the image clean. If you start to drag across the image, things will get out of control quickly. I also showed them the difference between the visual texture of the colors if you blend it in areas and leave it "raw" in others.

I think I will give classes an extra 10 to 15 minutes next week to finish up these images. There are a number of sharp looking ones that I didn't post because they were incomplete.

we're back!

Wow! We just returned from our 4 week spring break today. I really didn't think I could not post for so long, but I "surprised" myself. Off and running with the 2nd and 5th grade classes for the next 4 weeks.

One of the 2nd grade standards focuses on creating 3d space through overlapping, vertical placement, and size change. I throw value change into the mix as well. I found the work of illustrator Dante Terzigni through Pikaland and thought his work could work well introducing students to these concepts while offering an image that made them think, "Why did he (Dante) do that?" They're always wondering why I do things:)

I gathered some info off his website to share with students before digging into the hands on project. One tidbit was that he graduated from college in 2003, the same year that many of our 2nd graders were born. I talked about how he drew on paper for planning his ideas, but used a drawing tablet plugged into a computer to create his final illustrations.

When looking at some examples of his work, students were able to tell me that his shapes looked flat and kind of different, even though the shapes were based on real things. We also found out that even though his individual shapes looked flat, Dante created depth by changing the size, placement, and value of those shapes.

For the project, I decided to focus on an image of his called Flower Factory. Students identified the elements used to create 3d space in the image and then I asked them why Dante might have made the image. Many answers centered on him using his imagination. A few went further and addressed the need to make things look nicer, or to protect ourselves from the bad smoke that would come out of a factory. 

The students approached the project as a collage. They built the 2 layer city first, and then added stems and leaves, followed by the flower tops. I demonstrated where to start the layers of the city, but also stressed the desire for their concepts to look different than mine.

Some of the cityscapes look more natural than I was expecting, but they still demonstrate the necessary elements of 3d space that were required.

Some students in each class did not finish, so I will give them a few more minutes next week. These students that already finished can add some subtle pattern elements with pencil and crayon, so that their images have a bit of the variety in texture that makes Dante's designs visually richer.