In Space!

Primary 3/4 made these during their space project! The art lesson was inspired by this one here. In a previous lesson we took funny photos outside to learn more about perspective. In this lesson we drew around our hands and feet and then filled in the rest for a falling in space effect. Tricky but fun!

Van Gogh Landscapes

As part of the food and farming topic, Primary 3 created these Van Gogh-inspired oil pastel landscapes. There were lots of elements of art involved! The lesson was inspired be Ms Rogers Art Class and, despite being a couple years younger, I think these children did a very good job!

The Wayne Thiebaud-style cakes are also in the background. An old favourite lesson with more learning about form and tone using oil pastels (I think my original inspiration was here).

Bees

As part of their food and farming topic, Primary 3 learned about the importance of bees! In this lesson they learned about creating careful line drawings. The bees were then glued to a beehive background made by tracing hexagons with pencil, drawing smaller hexagons with oil pastel and then painting. There was a maths lesson about tessellation in there too! The whole art idea came from Ms Roger's Art Class.
 

In a Yellow Submarine

 

This drawing lesson brought in two themes from the Primary 3 1960s project: 'The Yellow Submarine' and the Thunderbirds (in which Thunderbird 4 was a yellow submarine). Children picked their submarine and learned how to observe carefully and create a line drawing. After colouring and cutting out the subs, we glued them to a background made by printing on soapy paint bubbles!

More 60s: Eardley and Lichtenstein

Why didn't I take any better pictures than these?? The first Primary 3 lesson looked at the work of Joan Eardley. We thought about what her paintings of children in 1950s-60s Glasgow could tell us about life for children in Scotland at the time. We then learned about drawing portraits and the children made their own Eardley-style self portraits.

In the next lesson we learned about Roy Lichtenstein. We also learned about onomatopoeia and picked a word to create word art in the style of Lichtenstein. We printed with bubble wrap to make the Ben Day dot effect, used felt tipped pens for the words and layered them all on coloured paper. There was lots of inspiration for this on Pinterest such as this from Cassie Stephens and this from Little Yeti.

Back to the 60s!

Two Primary 3 lessons here. Both were somewhat inspired by this photo. After looking for popular styles in photos from the sixties, the class worked in pairs to design their own outfit. One person in each pair then traced the other to transform their designs into life-size artwork!

We also explored the designs made popular by op art artists like Bridget Riley. We used paper weaving to make these black and white pieces inspired by this blog post which was inspired by this one (and there was also this one too).

 

Pop Art Emoji

The 1960s was our focus in Primary 3 for social studies but it would be impossible to understand the decade without its art - and, as a focus for our art lessons, the theme was full of interesting art concepts, techniques, and influential artists.

Tate Kids has a great video to help children understand the Pop Art movement, while this CBBC video introduces the ideas of Andy Warhol. We thought about how Pop Art reflects changes during the 1960s and represents popular culture. We then created Warhol-style prints which represent something from our own culture - emoji. The idea came from this blog.

We practised drawing our emoji before pressing it into a Styrofoam piece (one quarter of A4). I checked each stamp to make sure the lines had been pressed in deeply enough. For the next step, we divided A4 paper into quarters and used bright colours for the background. The printing was done with normal black tempera paint. The hardest part was getting not too much and not too little paint, then pressing down well enough (especially given the painted texture of the background). Once they had completed their picture, most continued printing and printing and printing...