slide show for perspective landscapes

Wonderful news! 

This year I have become addicted to google presentations for a number of reasons. 

I have recently figured out that I can "publish them to the web", meaning the presentations/slide shows can be accessed without logging in. Wahoo!

If you were a fan of my middle school perspective landscape lesson from last spring I now have my slide show posted as a google presentation. You can access it directly here -

so now I do not have to email out my folder of resource images. 

Enjoy!

Please please please make sure you site back to my lesson post if you post projects on your own. It is the right thing to do- AND I would love to see other teacher's results and adaptations. 

Farmland landscapes using perspective

I did this lesson with seventh graders, most of who have not learned anything about perspective drawing. This was a wonderful introduction to perspective drawing & landscapes. I would recommend it for 5th-7th grade. We did a 1 point perspective worksheet first. 

The use of soft pastel on colored construction paper is no fail.

I love setting the kids up with a project that is destined to look great. 

Students had to draw a landscape and include crop lines some how.

Tracing in sharpie before applying the pastel was optional. 

These were a few of the examples I showed the kids. If you'd like my entire slide show leave your email in the comments and I'll happily send it along to you.

*** I now have my slide show available via this link. ***

There are so many great Van Gogh examples, you could easily tie it in with a Van Gogh lesson. 

Some more great finished products:

Impressionist ocean paintings and ipads

This lesson successfully tackled monochromatic color mixing, interpreting light and nature, impressionism, and expressionist painting. 

I did this lesson at the very beginning of the year with seventh grade. I was just starting at my new school and wasn't sure where my students skills were at- this lesson worked really well as it gave me a chance to see what they knew and were comfortable with but gave them a more open ended way of working. Tempera paint was all we used. It would be great for 4th through 7th grade. 

We have a one-to-one Ipad program at my school. It has been incredible for my art teaching, opening up so many possibilities for my lessons. This was the first lesson I used them for.

My students went down to the waterfront with me [in the ten minutes it rained that day of course] and took photos of the ripples in the bay from the docks. (I know, I know, I'm living a dream right now...) but seriously... the students cropped the image down and translated them into paintings. I provided a slide show of Van Gogh, Monet, and Homer's paintings that all included water before they began painting.

References to Van Gogh, Monet, & Homer

"Cat"tastic Portraits with Personality

My first grade students have been working with the concept of portraits quite a bit this year. 

I came across a set of postcards by a local artist this winter when I was at the BizarreBazaar:

Sarah Coyne of Egg-a-Go-Go

"Cats in Clothes" series

I loved the cats with personalities of people and it reminded me that I inherited this book from a former teacher, "Impressionist Cats" by Susan Herbert:

The kids got a kick out of the cat portraits and impressionists impressions. More importantly though, they were great examples of how portraits can show a close up of a person, a whole body, emotion, clothing, occupation, etc.!

We approached our lesson like the postcards were composed- with an oval shaped 'frame' to draw our cat portrait within and a 'wall paper' background. My goal was to have each student have a closer up portrait and also a whole body portrait- due to severe sickness traveling throughout our student body there are many who only came out with one finished piece- but I still have piles of them and they are hilarious (and genius)!

Van Gogh Sunflowers

Van Gogh... Sunflowers... Symmetry... Shadows... I loved this project!

Step 1: Drawing and Painting the Sunflowers
The painting part of this project was also a color mixing lesson. The students painted the petals first- yellow tempera, then mixed orange with yellow and red for the middle of the flowers, then yellow and blue mixed for green stems.  I had the kids mix the paint right on the paper.

Step 2: Trace the flowers with black sharpie and add on "Van Gogh - esque" details.  Cut out the flowers and stems.

Step 3: Symmetrical Vases
The students cut out symmetrical shape vases and colored them with oil pastels to make a pattern.  I taped the stems to them to make them look like the flowers were in the vase.

Step 4: Shadows
The 2nd graders had been studying shadows.  We traced the flowers and vase and then filled in the outline with black crayon rubbing .  We drew a table line and glued the flowers down a little to the side of the shadow to create the illusion of a shadow on the wall behind.

Step 5: Painting the table and wallpaper.