More Op Art

Last time I taught op art was a couple of years ago. My current group have been studying light and sight in science so it seemed a perfect time to teach about it again!

There were loads of ideas I wanted to try but we just had time for the line 'tornado' op art (which I wrote about last time here) and a collaborative project using one-point perspective. It was a different design to last time but also a design I found on-line. Unfortunately it was a picture someone had 'pinned' and I had no luck tracing where the original came from! We also looked at op art on the Smartboard.

Anyway, I drew most of the design in pencil, explained it to the kids and they finished the pencil part and did the colouring in whenever they had a spare moment.

They all looooved op art! They were drawing their own designs at home, bringing in books, pictures they'd found... So we even wrote reports about the history of op art (this fun Bridget Riley video clip from the BBC helped).

Starry Night

As we'd been studying space in science, it seemed a good time to look at a famous painting of the night sky! 

To start off we discussed the painting, thinking especially about how Van Gogh portrayed movement. To help with this, we compared the painting to a photo of star trails and also watched this mesmerising interactive Starry Night (which I came across on Deep Space Sparkle).

We also learned more about Vincent Van Gogh, starting from this fun BBC video clip.

The pictures were made with oil pastels, first drawing black outlines for the 'mountain', hills and buildings, then adding colours to those parts and finally completing the sky. We built up a mix of colours using lines, trying to follow the same direction to achieve a flowing effect.

In the first lesson I thought, 'Agghhh I never knew hills could be so hard to draw!!' but by the end every child had produced a beautiful, and surprisingly individual, piece of art.

Gingerbread Cottages

Once upon a time in the heart of a dark, dark wood there was a little cottage... and when the children learned that they were going to make their own little cottage they were super excited!

This wasn't an art lesson (in fact it was mostly a maths lesson as we talked a lot about weighing ingredients and measuring for making the dough) but it was very creative. They worked in groups to make the dough and the next day they cut out their pieces to be baked. Of course the highlight was later that day when they got to build their houses with copious amounts of icing and sweets!

It was a little bit on the stressful side getting twenty little gingerbread cottages to stay standing (especially as, in spite of demonstrations and reminders, most started off spreading icing across biscuits like butter on toast - sometimes not even putting it where the pieces would join together!). We got there in the end and all had lots of fun in the process!

Carol Singers

It may only be September but my class were designing Christmas cards. As ridiculously early as it may seem, the designs needed to be done now so that parents could make orders and cards could be printed in time for Christmas.

When I spotted a these collage carol singers, I knew they would look great when printed and just had to try them! I saw the idea on Deep Space Sparkle but it came from the blog Plastiquem.

I didn't give the children a lot of help with shapes and sizes so the results were quite varied. Some had more difficulty drawing and cutting suitable shapes than I had anticipated! Nevertheless these will still make great cards. We splattered white paint over the background for snow as a finishing touch.

Rainforest Animals

This lesson is from ages ago (i.e. before the summer holidays). The class were learning about the rainforest so we made a wall display of rainforest animals and trees, plus individual images. 

Although I had planned to use chalk on black paper, my plans were much improved by ideas from Deep Space Sparkle. I especially liked the idea of drawing in black oil pastel to (somewhat) contain the chalk dust. The children also enjoyed watching the video of artwork from that post.

The kids did a great job looking at rainforest frogs, birds and other creatures to draw their pictures. The colours were a bit dull because we used coloured chalk rather than chalk pastels (and the colours look even duller in the photos from being up on the wall all summer). Lots of hairspray made them possible to mount!

 

Art and Maths

I always love it when different subjects come together. One of the requirements for maths at this level is that children 'draw representations of 3D shapes using different methods', so what better way to do this than in an art lesson?

When planning these art/maths lessons, I happened to come across this idea on Arteascuola (I just discovered this blog, hence borrowing ideas from it two weeks in a row - she has loads of amazing lessons!). This lesson focused on using shading to make shapes look 3D.

This child only used one style of shading but got very into doing the patterns!

Because I was trying to cover both art and maths, we started with a discussion about different 3D shapes and their properties. Then we thought about how three of these shapes - the cylinder, cube and sphere - could look on paper, looking especially at how many faces we could see in one go.

After looking carefully at real 3D objects, I demonstrated methods for drawing them and the children practised on dry-wipe boards before adding them on paper. We then looked at the importance of adding tone to make the shapes look 3D and practised shading, cross-hatching and 'overlapping scrawls' (thank you to Arteascuola for the great step-by-step description - see the link above!).

The final step was adding patterns in felt-tipped pens for the background. We didn't really sped enough time on this last step to do it justice, but most pupils did manage three 3D-style shapes by the end of the lesson!

Beatriz Milhazes

With Brazil as our current class project I did some searching for a Brazilian artist and opted to study Beatriz Milhazes (e.g. see picture below). As you will see, her work was especially appropriate given that we'd just learnt to draw circles with compasses in maths...

It took rather a lot of experimenting with different materials before I decided on a way to make this style of art manageable for 9-10 year olds. In the end, I decided to limit them to creating a collage with only three colours of paper. They had to include different styles of circle in a composition with other lines and shapes.

After watching a few minutes of this video on YouTube to discuss the artist's inspirations and techniques, I demonstrated a few different ideas - ring shapes, overlapping circles with a different colour for the overlap, an op-art cube idea inspired by Arteascuola.

Not many are finished but I'm really pleased with the ideas and creativity I've seen so far!

 Not finished but I like the pyramid!

   My example - I think it helped having a few simple ideas to look at!

Cake, cake and more cake!

Today as part of a charity fundraiser, we had a bake sale, a baking competition (entered by about half the school) and ate an awful lot of cake. So I decided our art lesson should involve...more cake.

I must admit I'd never heard of Wayne Thiebaud before seeing him on various art blogs - perhaps I'm wrong but I don't think he's as well known here as in America. In any case, he was the perfect inspiration for this lesson.

We started with a Powerpoint and I explained that they were going to draw a cake with a slice taken out.

I let them have a go at drawing it on their mini-whiteboards and it was very interesting to see how they went about it! I then took them through simple steps for drawing the shape and they kept practising on their boards.

Originally I had planned to draw the cakes on white paper and colour with oil pastels but then found a similar lesson on ARTipelago which used black paper. This made the cakes stand out much better.

I think every child in the class was successful with their cake and, apart from a few which could do with a plate, they were all finished in about an hour!

Dali Style 'Melting Clocks'

It felt like a while since we'd last thought about a famous artist so I decided to go for Salvador Dali, partly because I liked the Dali museum in Paris, partly because we're doing time in maths (so clocks fit in well), also because he's just so crazy.

To start off we watched a fun video clip, 'Totally Famous: Salvador Dali' from CBBC, and then looked at a Powerpoint with information and pictures.

We then made our own versions of 'The Persistence of Memory'... Everyone drew a clock melting over a 'table' and over a branch. The table one was hard as they couldn't get their heads around having to draw the two sections of the clock at different angles. I let them add in whatever other details they liked.

The drawings looked good but things got harder at the painting stage, especially as we were using tints and shades to make things more 3D. I insisted that their scrap paper was their most important tool and that they had to test all their colours out! Despite the difficulty of the painting, I think we ended up with some pretty good surrealist art!

Winter Trees

This post is going back to December again... We decided to create a 'winter tree' display in school so I decided to have a go at the 'winter birch tree' lesson I'd seen popping up all over the internet! I particularly liked the instructions and wonderful examples on 'A Faithful Attempt'.

After the first lesson I have to admit I was quite worried as, in spite of practising on scrap paper first, I was seeing rather interesting green stripy skies and bits of art that looked more like some kind of African pattern or animal print than a winter scene. I hadn't anticipated the blending for the sky being quite that tricky! In the end though, the paintings looked great.

One thing I can't understand though...whenever I try the 'salt effect' (putting salt on to wet paint), nothing happens! Maybe I use the wrong kind of paint or salt or just do it wrong. Oh well, it would have looked good in these pictures if I could work it out!

Nutcrackers

As we were busy preparing dances for a whole school performance of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker before Christmas, a bit of nutcracker art and writing fit in perfectly.

As well as inspiration from our nutcracker work in school, I looked at the nutcracker art lesson from the Georgetown Elementary art blog and especially liked the idea of linking the lesson to figure drawing - something which we'd practised earlier in the year. Nutcracker drawing turned out to be rather easier than figure drawing, probably because they don't actually need to look like real people...

We drew the nutcrackers in pencil and coloured in crayon. A couple of things which really helped the kids to draw the nutcrackers were: 1. The idea (from Art Projects for Kids) of folding the paper lightly in half so that the nutcracker's 'hips' are half way down the page; 2. Drawing the hips first - if they got that part to be a reasonably size, the rest came more easily.