Studio Art: Painting Unit, Watercolor

For our first project in our painting unit, I wanted to start out with something simple and fun, so we created abstract expressionism watercolor paintings.  The students had a blast with these paintings, and I think it shows!

We started off by using Kandinsky as our bell ringer artist to talk about abstract expressionism and emotion in an artwork.

Then, we took two days in our sketchbooks to learn 12 different watercolor techniques.  Students masked off 12 squares in the textbook and I walked them through the techniques one at a time.  Students then carefully peeled off their masking tape and labeled each square with the technique, writing a brief description as to how to do the technique as well.

The techniques we covered were:

Wet on wet wash

Wet on dry way

Graded wash

Salt

Lifting Off

Rubbing Alcohol

Tissue paper

Color/Water Dropping

Plastic wrap

Wax resist

Dry Brush

Glaze

Here are some of their finished products.  The requirements of the project were that students had to use color, line and shape to create an emotion or feeling.  They had to use at least five of the different watercolor techniques in their paintings, and they could not paint something representational. Students painted three different paintings and then choose the one they felt showed the most emotion to mat and hand in.

These two are mine.

1st Grade: Northern Lights

One of the NYS Listening & Learning strands for 1st grade is Astronomy, so I wanted to find a cool art project that I could do with my 1st graders.  I thought about doing a Starry Night-esque painting using constellations, but I thought that would be a little above my students, no matter how much I simplified it.  Despite the simple steps I broke this project down into, it literally took us almost four complete classes to do this...i.e. an entire month!  Needless to say, my 1st grade classes this year are rambunctious!  

Anyways, I found the idea for this project floating around on Pinterest...the link took me to the blog Fun Art 4 Kids, where I pretty much used the process there word for word.  The original poster used this with 6th graders whereas I used it with 1st graders.  I think the project was still successful and probably would have been even more successful if they listened to directions a little better.

On the first day, we drew our mountains on manila tag board and then cut them out.  Unbelievably, this took an ENTIRE class period because students weren't listening.  I had to approve of their mountain line before I let them cut, and they had to cut them out in one piece (so they essentially ended up with two sets of mountains). Students started cutting before I was able to get to them to approve their design...and cut their mountains into four pieces, or did it vertically instead of horizontally, or made them really small...the list is endless.

After we passed that mountain (haha!), we talked about analogous colors on the color wheel and painted our watercolor paper.  Again, many students didn't follow directions when told they had to choose three analogous colors to paint their paper.  During the painting process, I asked them to sprinkle the salt onto their paper.  This was a disaster.  I learned real quick it was better for me to sprinkle the salt as they painted their paper.  They either painted too slow and the paint dried before they sprinkled the salt, or they painted, sprinkled salt, and painted over the top of the salt.  Eventually, I decided to sprinkle the salt and once I did, they weren't allowed to paint in that spot again.

On the third day, we did the lights in the sky.  We took the mountain patterns that we made and choose the biggest (tallest) mountain and laid it on the black paper.  Students had to take three different colors of chalk pastels and draw lines from the mountains up to the top of their paper. Then, we took a tissue and wiped the chalk in the same direction to blend the colors (without making too much of a mess on our hands).  I found that it was a little difficult for the younger students to hold the pattern in place while coloring, so I went around and put paper clips on theirs to help them hold it in place.

On the last day, we traced our mountain patterns on the watercolor paper that was painted on day 2.  Again, they had to cut the mountains out in one piece.  Students took the biggest mountain and glued it in place on their background.  I then asked students to trade their small mountain range with another student.  You WOULD NOT BELIEVE the number of students who were unhappy about this!!!  Usually, they are always giving each other their free draws and swapping, trying to help each other out and draw on each other's work.  When I asked them to switch, I had one boy who almost had a complete break down!

The last step on day 4 was to add the constellations.  This was my addition to the original project and was the big connection to their listening and learning strand.  I handed out a constellation sheet that I found on the internet and we quickly went over what each constellation represented (big dipper, little dipper, Orion, etc.) and how they could tell which constellation was what.  Students simply used white chalk to add the constellations.

So, after all of that, here are our finished projects!

Shape Cows with Patterns

Hi all!  I feel like it's been forever since I've posted!  With everything going on lately, it's been very difficult to find time...plus, my internet has been down at home!  With that being said, I have A LOT of stuff to share with you.

The first thing I'll share is what my kindergartners just finished up.  We did shape cows and practiced our patterns.  This was a project that I did last year with them as well.  The one little change I made was to have them use black crayons instead of black Sharpie to outline everything, in part to reinforce the wax resist technique and also because I'm running out of Sharpies this year!  I also had them make their patterns in black instead of allowing them to use colored crayons...just to change it up a bit.

Again, this is one of those projects that aligns with the Common Core Math standards...the one where kindergartners are supposed to be able to identify shapes.  I didn't know this, but apparently they don't do patterns anymore in kindergarten!  Patterns are supposed to be learned in Pre-K now, so this was also a good review of patterns.

I must apologize for the photographs of these.  They are very wrinkly because my students started these with a substitute, who grabbed the wrong paper.  If you ever want to know what watercolor paint looks like on cheap, 60 lb. drawing paper, here it is!

Currently, my students are participating in the Common Core Listening & Learning strand about weather and the seasons, so our current project in the works right now is a spring project.  Students are drawing themselves under an umbrella, and then we will be blowing blue paint with straws to make the rain!  Hopefully I'll be able to share those finished projects next week! :)

3rd Grade: Fall Birch Trees

The next finished elementary project is another oldie but a goodie...the fall birch trees in 3rd grade.  I also happened to have my first observation this year during this lesson and it went swimmingly well! As with the 1st grade pumpkin patch drawings, I've blogged about this project before, so I won't get into too much detail about how we did them.  I will say, however, that instead of using pan watercolor paint (or liquid watercolor), we used watercolor pencils this year, which was a first for me.  Watercolor pencils was a new thing I added to my requisitions this year and the kids loved using them!

Basically, we taped off our birch trees, drew in our horizon lines, added details, colored with the watercolor pencils, painted over with water, ripped the tape off, scraped the birch tree lines and then dabbed the fall leaves...phew!

Spring/Summer Birch Trees

Here's our last 3rd grade birch tree project.  For this one I didn't give them any directions, other than it had to be a spring/summer landscape with birch trees!  This was like the "test" birch tree project, since we didn't review depth before starting.  I don't have any watercolor pencils, but I decided to let the kids use regular colored pencils if they wanted instead of crayon.  They worked pretty well!  If you haven't already seen them, here are all of our other birch trees from this year:

Fall Birch Trees (Students received full instruction and demonstration.)

Winter Birch Trees  (Students received review of depth.)

I wish some of the students paid more attention!  I had a few really great landscapes that had blank birch trees!

2nd Grade Printmaking Unit: Symmetrical City Scapes

For the second project in our printmaking unit, students created these symmetrical city scapes using the intaglio process.  On the first day, we reviewed the warm and cool colors.  We folded our paper in half and drew a border around the edge (sans Phyl at There's a Dragon in My Art Room!).  The top half was painted with warm colors to represent the sunset and the bottom half was painted with cool colors to represent the water.  The great thing I found that I like about having the kids add the border is that it makes their artwork easier to crop on Artsonia!  Some students didn't do that great of a job drawing an even border all the way around, but that's okay, it still made it a little easier to get a nicer crop done.

On the second day, I introduced students to the intaglio process.  I showed them how to lightly draw into a piece of Styrofoam (which were pieces of to-go boxes I bought from a local restaurant) to create the city.  I made sure to show students how their buildings needed to be touching.  After I gave students the go-ahead, they cut out their city and then made their print.

I had my students use black block printing ink for this.  They squirted the ink onto a bench hook and then used a brayer to roll it out and onto their Styrofoam.  Now, here's where I changed this project up a bit from what I found on Pinterest.  The pin I found brought me to the Laugh, Paint, Create blog where this project was done as well.  The teacher there had the students make two prints from their city, one for the city and one for the reflection.  My OCD hit me at this point because I didn't like how the reflection isn't actually a reflection on their projects!

So, I had the students place their inked plate onto the water and press down.  Before they pulled it up, I had them put glue on the back of the plate.  Then, they were allowed to pull the plate up and glue it onto the warm colored side.