By Patty on Feb 13, 2017 |
ABOUT CLAUDE MONET When Monet was young, he noticed that painters created dark and very serious art during this time. Subjects like history and religion bored him. He preferred bright colors that showed scenes from everyday life. Monet started to paint pictures with loose and sketchy strokes. Many people thought that his work wasn’t complete, but Monet didn’t care. He continued to paint the way he saw the world. Claude Monet was the first painter in the Impressionist movement. The word IMPRESSIONISM comes from one of Monet’s first paintings called Impression: Sunrise. Art critics labelled the painting, impressionism, in order to mock it but the term stuck. It now means painting with light. Monet liked to paint series of the same images with the only difference being how the light fell on the subject during certain times of the day. He painted over 30 paintings of the haystacks near his home. TRY THIS LESSON: I love lessons that expose a pattern to an otherwise complicated painting. When you first look at Monet’s painting, The Isle Grande Jatte, 1878, it looks rather complicated and daunting to paint. But when you layer the artwork and outline the simple lines of the background first, then add the foreground at the very end, it becomes manageable. HERE’S WHAT YOU’LL NEED: 12″ x 18″ regular white drawing paper (I use Tru-Ray) Liquid tempera paints (white, green, yellow, blue, black) Colored oil pastels medium round brush Small pointed round brush and black tempera paint WHAT TO DO: On a white sheet of paper, draw a simple HORIZON LINE. This operates the water from the sky. Then, draw a hill line over the horizon line. Add a few simple homes/barns and buildings with oil pastels. With a sky color paint (Monet often used yellow tones for the sky) paint a sky. Paint the hills with a muted green color. Paint the water, using white, blues and greens. Keep in mind that Monet painted choppy reflections in the water. have children copy the colors of the buildings and use paint to make dappled marks in the water. Use a small brush and the watered down black tempera paint to paint the trees. Watch the video to see how the trees...
Read More
By Patty on Dec 5, 2016 |
Introducing Gustav Klimt to your students is really like opening up a pot of gold. There are so many interesting facets to his art and his life. One of the most impactful pieces to his story is how many of his works were destroyed by the Germans during WWII. Medicine, painted in 1900-1907 was destroyed along with a few others. I recently picked up a book that features beautiful Klimt-inspired illustrations. If you are doing a lesson on Klimt and in particular, his Tree of Life, I encourage you to find a copy of this book. Perfect for grade 3 and...
Read More
By Patty on Dec 4, 2016 |
Part culture, part color theory and all fun, this Mola-inspired Holiday Stocking will keep the kids busy drawing, cutting and composing their own colorful stockings. ABOUT MOLAS Molas are cloth panels that form part of a blouse for the Kuna women of Panama. They use a quilting technique called reverse appliqué to create the designs in the fabric. Because I used to be (and hope to be again!) a quilter, I know all about reverse appliqué. It’s pretty fun to do but darn hard to explain to kids. After a few attempts I decided that it’s just best to say that a Mola is a fabric panel with colorful strips sewn in. USING MOLAS IN THE ART ROOM Art teachers all over the world incorporate Mola art into their curriculum to help children connect with the process and purpose of creating art. Sometime art becomes abstract for kids if all we do is teach our students that art is about history and famous artists. Art can be found all around us: where we live, our clothing and everyday objects. One way to do this is by understanding THE STEPS to making a Mola-Inspired project: Draw Mola image with basic shapes and rainbow or echo lines. Molas are made up of basic, recognizable shapes: turtle, sun, flower, fish, etc. Notice that the Mola has a basic center shape and then lines are drawn around this shape to create the recognizable image. In the Mola above, the turtle starts out as an OVAl. Lines are drawn around the oval to create the head and four legs. Repeat the drawing of lines until you have the shape desired. Add vertical or horizontal strips of paper to achieve the decorative background. This can also be achieved using construction paper crayons or oil pastels. DOWNLOAD A FREE MOLA STOCKING PROJECT ARE YOU A MEMBER? The Mola-Inspired Stocking full project tutorial plus hundreds of lesson plans, art resources and videos is included with your monthly membership. Enrollment opens again in August...
Read More
By Patty on May 31, 2016 |
Have you ever thought about creating a collaborative mural with you students? It helps not to think about the logistics. Just imagine how it would feel to walk inside a school courtyard and see a decade’s worth of murals peppering the stucco walls. Over the past ten years, I created and co-created over 13 murals. Want to see them? 2007 Ancient Greece Mural 2007 California Produce Mural 2008 Earth Science Mural 2008 Keith Haring Mural 2009 Literature Inspired Mural 2009 Butterfly Inspired Mural 2010 Nautical Mural 2011 California Marine Life Mural 2012 Ancient Greece Mural 2013 America the Beautiful 2014 Kimmy Cantrell-Inspired Mural 2015 Cars: Past, Present & Future Mural I’m missing photographs of my very first mural–California Coastline. It was a biggie and the scope of the project almost deterred me from ever making mural again, but as you can see from the pictures above, that I did. If you want to make a mural like the ones above, I put together a How to Make a Ceramic Tile Mural PDF packet. It details all the steps that go into making a mural like this one. The only steps I don’t cover are the installation. I highly recommend anyone who is interested in this type of installation,refer to a contractor in your area. Installations differ depending on climate and interior or exterior mounting. 2016 Ceramic Mural: Santa Barbara For my last mural with the students at Brandon Elementary, the teachers chose the theme: Santa Barbara. Like all murals, we scheduled 45 minutes to explain the mural process to the kids, detail the theme and provide visuals for tile possibilities. I wanted to keep the mural-making simple this year as I wouldn’t be on campus to tweak and adjust, so we chose a grid style with collaborative tile groups as an option. This particular 6th grade class were highly individualistic and many chose to work alone. You can decide if this is okay with you. Some years, we only offered collaborative grids within the theme and other years we chose entirely solo tiles. Most of the drawing day was spent trouble shooting groups, adjusting for the exact number of students and tiles (math plays a part here) and making...
Read More
By Patty on May 24, 2016 |
The Sketchbook Project is a record of how my sixth grade students used sketchbooks during their art class to record art information and create projects. Learn how I used sketchbooks instead of individual sheets of paper to teach art & creativity. Week One: The Beginning Week Two: Creating Value Week Three: Atmospheric Perspective Week Four: Tree Line Drawings Week Five: Sonia Delaunay Abstract Art Week Six: Portrait Journalling Week Seven: Line drawings Week Eight: Farm Animals WHAT WE DID: Books have continued to be the most consistent source of art lesson inspiration for me. Eye to Eye: How Animals See The World by Steven Jenkins (Amazon affiliate link) is an exploration of close-up images of various animal eyes. As the last project in our Sketchbook series, I still wanted the project to use art supplies that could be picked up at anytime so that the children could finish their artwork at home or during free choice class time. I set a variety of coloring tools on each table (markers, colored pencils and pastels) and allowed the kids to choose whichever medium they wanted. I also photocopied pages from the book so that the kids could select an animal eye that they liked as well as downloaded and printed a few photographs of close-up animal eyes to place on the white board. This provided enough examples of kids to start weeding through what appealed to them. Ad the kids moved through drawing and then to coloring, many students remembered my collection of metallic paints and asked if they could use them. The combination of a marker background with metallic paint details was really effective! OBSERVATION DRAWING Like many of the drawing lessons in this sketchbook series, the goal was not to provide guided instructions on how to draw an eye but rather encourage the students to select an animal eye and use a scaled-up method to create a composition on their paper. I asked the children to consider the eyeball the feature of the art project; to make it prominent and large enough so that even the smallest details can be seen. Truthfully, this is still a challenge for many students. If you find that some of your students are struggling to draw a large eyeball, offer a few randomly sized plastic containers for the child...
Read More
By Patty Palmer on Feb 16, 2016 |
The Sketchbook Project is a record of how my sixth grade students used sketchbooks during their art class to record art information and create projects. Learn how I used sketchbooks instead of individual sheets of paper to teach art & creativity. Week One: The Beginning Week Two: Creating Value Week Three: Atmospheric Perspective Week Four: Tree Line Drawings Week Five: Sonia Delaunay Abstract Art Week Six: Portrait Journalling Week Seven: Line drawings WHAT WE DID: Drawing animals is a favorite art subject for pretty much every child. Children love to draw their pet and can often do so with ease, but drawing an unfamiliar animal takes some practice. For this project, I wanted to offer my 6th graders the opportunity to explore farm animals. I gathered some books, of which Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman remains my favorite. The strategy for this project was to encourage the kids to use their sketchbook to practice drawing a few animals. I photocopied animal pictures from books and placed some photographs on the white board. I asked the kids to draw at least 3 different animals, or one animal 3 different ways. The intention was to push them out of any comfort zones they may have. After they sketched a few animals, they selected which animals they wanted to develop further. Using pencils, the kids drew their animal(s) in an art-style of their choice. This was the fun part. Some kids created farm scenes, others created pop art animals, others went 3-D…so many options! And with many of the Sketchbook projects in this series, I allowed the kids to use whatever coloring medium they wanted. Some used markers, pencil crayons, watercolor paints and others went the collage route. I have to admit, that this project produced the most varied results. The kids LOVED choosing their own medium. At first I worried that allowing the children to move around the art room to gather supplies from the art cupboards would result in chaos, but the opposite happened. They were quick and deliberate. They put their own supplies back when class was over. They were empowered with their freedom (as most 6th graders are) and for me it resulted in a lively art-making session. I don’t know if this fits in with the choice-based classroom...
Read More
