Portrait Weaving Inspired by Chuck Close

     The fourth graders just finished these cool portraits that we have worked on FOREVER!  We started them when the weather was bad and we missed a lot of school, and then we missed some classes because the kids had rehearsals for their spring program, and we have FINALLY finished!  I am proud of the kids' dedication to these artworks that took so long to make.

    We were inspired by the amazing paintings of Chuck Close and his awesome grid work.  To start, I took photos of the kids and then made them into posters on Picasa.  The kids glued the pieces of their photos to 18" x 24" paper, we folded them in half, and then drew lines every 2 inches apart.  The kids cut on the lines to create warps to weave through.

    They then wove 2" strips of paper through their portraits, and drew the missing parts of their faces.  From here, they traced with Sharpies, colored and made patterns in the background with crayons, and finished by painting with watercolors.  In the photos you can see that I also printed a smaller copy of each kid's portrait for them to use as reference.  

 

Jungle Artworks Inspired by Rousseau

     I love Henri Rousseau and it's been a few years since I've done a project about him, so I thought it was about time!  In fourth grade at Suffield, we talked about Rousseau and how he would sometimes look at plants and trees that were accessible to him in France and make changes to them to make them look like they belonged in a jungle.  We learned about the parts of a landscape and then looked at and drew house plants.  The kids altered the scale of the plants to place them in the various parts of their landscapes.  

     They traced their jungle landscapes with charcoal pencils and colored with watercolor pencils and crayons.  After painting water over the watercolor media, they drew jungle animals on other paper and used 3D Dots to attach them to their landscapes.  The kids really liked doing all the different media steps involved with this project!  

     You can see that we used manila colored drawing paper for the landscapes. This is NOT traditional manila paper.  Watercolor crayons and pencils won't work as nicely on manila paper.  We did this so that the animals would pop even more on their white paper.

4th Grade 2D and 3D Favorite Foods

 

     The Brimfield fourth graders did a whole unit on Pop Art (we mainly focused on Lichtenstein) and their favorite foods.  They sculpted their favorite foods out of clay and then began 2-dimensional artworks of the same food.  They painted the sculptures with tempera paints and colored their drawings with markers.  This was a fun but pretty simple unit that worked well during our session where we missed MANY days of school due to terrible weather.

Fourth Grade Snowmen!

     I have seen pastel snowmen lessons all over the wonderful art education blog world, and I could not resist this lesson any longer!  We too read Snowmen at Night by Carolyn and Mark Buehner.  We studied and discussed Mark Buehner's illustrations and the way he was able to give the snowmen dimension and form by using various color blending techniques.  I challenged the fourth graders to create a pastel snowman scene where the snowman or snowmen were doing some kind of action or activity.  When the pastel artworks were completed, I had them create another snowman scene with pencils, Sharpies, and watercolor pencils.  The students really liked working with these materials after having worked with the challenging, and less detail-oriented pastels.  The kids were so creative with these artworks and we really enjoyed them!