Positive Text Designs with Marker Prints

   

 
    Over the summer I saw a Facebook video that demonstrated the neatest marker printing technique using storage bags, non-permanent markers, and water.  This link is not the exact video I saw, but the beginning shows the printing process that I was excited to try with my students.  We did not follow the lettering process shown in the video.

     This was our first fifth grade project for the year, and so I decided to have the kids come up with some statements to encourage positive thinking.  We also looked at many different styles of lettering and the students tried to turn their text into art.  This was a fun, easy and quick project to get us started for the year!

When I Grow Up Portraits

     In second grade we did these great full-body self-portraits of "What I want to be when I grow up".  The kids included backgrounds with enough details to help people understand their ideas.  We used watercolor crayons and pencils as well as tray watercolors to complete these.

Art Masterpiece Parodies

Mackenzie H.

  

    In fifth grade, I wanted to do some kind of a lesson about art history that would still seem fresh and exciting to the kids.  We started out by looking at seven famous masterpieces and discussing why they were successful and what has contributed to them becoming famous works of art.  We looked at Mona Lisa (da Vinci), American Gothic (Grant), Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Kahlo), The Boating Party (Cassatt), A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Seurat), Starry Night (van Gogh), and The Scream (Munch).  We then looked some parodies of these artworks with cartoon characters, Star Wars characters, extra that I found doing a few Google searches.

     We also watched some music parodies of popular songs from YouTube.  This helped us to understand that listeners/viewers would not recognize the original work if it were not very famous or if too many alterations had been made.

     The kids chose a masterpiece to work with and created visual parodies based on them.  They had various forms of dry and wet mediums to choose from to complete their work.  I had both a dry and wet media station with different media options and varying levels of opaqueness (watercolors vs. tempera cakes).

Breakfast Delight by Sam L. 

Flowers In the Night by Boston S.

Olivia S.

The Nerda-Lisa by Emma K.

Tractor Invasion by Tyler R.

Starry Night Cat by Jacob K.

Mona Alien by Jacob M.

"Moona Lisa" by Matt K.

Blocky Night by Ryan P.

Text Design Ambition Artworks

     It has been a while since I've updated the blog and I'm so excited to share this neat lesson with you!!!  I have moved more to sharing our work on Instagram (Follow us @suffieldart), but still will post new lessons from time to time here!

     For this lesson, we first did some writing about the students' goals and ambitions for themselves.  I gave them prompts to choose from like, "When I grow up, I will...., I will never...., I always want to....", etc, to help them get started.  While they were writing, I photographed them.  We then looked at Alexandra Grant, Fiona Banner, and Pablo Lehmann; all artists who heavily use text in their work.  

     In their artwork, they were responding to the challenge, "Use your writing and photograph in an artwork using watercolor mediums.".  We used tray watercolors in addition to watercolor crayons and pencils.  We also had lots of mini-lessons and demonstrations along the way in addition to peer critiques.  

     I am so happy with the range of responses the students had in their work!

Leadership Day Displays!

We just hosted our first Leadership Day as an official Leader in Me School!  We had over 80 visitors from surrounding schools to see how we've implemented the Leader in Me program at our school, and it was a huge success!  Our students ran the show and represented our Suffield Elementary family in the most wonderful way.  Here are a few photos from my displays that focus on leadership.