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.