Oil pastel figure lesson differentiated for High School

  A little while back I posted a successful middle school lesson

I did using oil pastels and wood figures. 

The high school art teacher I work with recently used the lesson with her Drawing and Painting I class. The high school students used white 18 x 24 paper (I used 12 x 18 with middle school) and made them really big. The added challenge was to include a complementary color background to make the figures really pop. They are awesome!

Middle school self-portraits with style

Self-portraits!

These were done by my sixth graders. 

I wanted to squeeze in portraits but I was in a time crunch

so I went for a graphic design, limited color palette approach. 

Their practice drawings included shading but not the final products. 

I gave the students the option to do sunglasses in lieu of eyes but surprisingly only a few of them took me up on my offer. 

The backgrounds were inspired by Beatriz Milhazes. 

The kids were limited to sharpie, fat black marker, grey marker, and one color. 

After this project we dove into a unit focused on the principles of design, so this was a great segue from the last unit focused on realistic drawing into the new one. 

Ancient Egyptian Portraits made modern

After spending a few classes on head-on portrait drawing

fifth graders switched up their angle and made these

Profile view Egyptian style portraits. 

We looked closely at many examples of Egyptian artwork, discussing notable stylistic details, the significance of head-dresses and skin color, and hieroglyphics.

Romare Bearden's Rock Stars

First grade made these super fun collages while studying about Romare Bearden's life and artwork. 

Did you know he was an artist, musician, baseball player, in the army, and had a teaching degree?

So interesting!

There are an abundance of great resources for teaching meaningful in-depth lessons about Bearden. The National Gallery of Art has a fantastic booklet in pdf form (click here ), lots of information on The Bearden Foundation website, and there is a Dropping in on Romare Video (best for grades 2-4) but great for examining his work in depth. 

In the Dropping in on video they show Romare's cat and then you realize the cat is in some of his art works as well. We added his cat to our pictures which is why there is a random cat on some of the rock and roll sets. Some of the kids dressed the cat up as well. Pretty hilarious. 

Early Carolina Morning

Using the checkerboard floor inspiration of Early Carolina Morning the kids started by making 3 rows of checkerboard by gluing down squares of cut up newspaper. (Some of them didn't quite get it as you can see- but for the ones that did it looked really cool.)

Using jazz music and performing musicians as our inspiration the students made musician collages. 

I had photocopies of instruments the kids could cut out for their collage. They had to create a person with the instrument in mind so that the position of the arms made sense. 

Empress of the Blues

Materials we used:
-Newspaper squares for the floor
-Clothes: either fabric or wall paper scraps
-Skin: I bought Roylco skin color paper this year- it has been great for lots of projects.
-Photocopies of pictures of guitars, banjos, brass instruments
-Construction paper scraps
-*** The real crowd please was the hologram paper for the disco ball.  

Frida-inspired Portraits with First Grade

 First of all, this book is SO fantastic!

Frida by Jonah Winter

I would read it to elementary or even middle school students because the pictures are beautiful and the text is concise and well written, quickly hitting the big ideas students should be taking from Frida's life and work.

 

Moving on, following the reading self-portraits I decided while

we were in the groove to do self-portraits of the students whole faces too.

I took it as an opportunity to tie in an artist and have been itching to get to Frida!

The children get so invested when they learn about an artist's life it is truly worth the time to share the information. The kids were so invested in their pictures AND Frida. 

I approached her work as an artist this way:
Frida Kahlo was a sad person because she was in pain. She really enjoyed art so she painted to make herself feel better. She painted many self-portraits that included things that made her happy using her imagination since she often could not leave her bedroom or house. This is why we see animals, flowers, and vegetation in her images. 

What makes you happy?

 

Students drew self-portraits, used their appropriate skin color crayon, and added in things, places, and people that make them happy. These included many animals, pictures of family member, Six Flags (of course), flowers, and bright colors.

Did you know she had a pet deer?

Two day transition: Shading to Perspective

We reviewed shading and making lights to mediums to darks flow

with both crayon and colored pencil last week. 

Before explaining perspective and delving in logistically  I developed this did this two day lesson  inspired by this Artsonia image I had pinned which was really successful! 

Pencils, black block crayons for rubbing, rulers, sharpies- that's it! 

In two days the students learned how to measure and use a ruler, create depth, learned more about Keith Haring, and reviewed figure drawing! Woo! 

Day one: Measure with ruler

Students had a practice manilla paper and real construction paper. 

This gave them four chances to get it right if they needed (2 sides, 2 papers)

which they appreciated.

Shading light to dark in each quadrant.

Day two: figure drawing review, viewed a short reel of Keith Haring videos I put together on youtube.

They had to do three practice figure drawing. 

Added on the figure and sharpied it in.

(The design at the top was so clever I could never have come up with this idea myself-

thank god for 10 year old minds!)

Next week I try out DMasse's blocks, projector, and whiteboard trick!

More images to come! 

so cute I had to post... reading self-portrait

I had to post these- They came out so cute. 

Our school has a school-wide initiative for veracious reading this year. 

I thought these would be the perfect start to it!

Self-portraits of the students reading their favorite books:

I bought a few packages of some skin tone paper to test out. 

It actually worked great. 

Magnified Insects

1. Magnifying Glasses--- made from 6" paper plates, painted with the sparkly prang watercolors as an extra treat for the kids. 

2. Paint the dirt and grass! --- paint spots of brown watercolor paint, paint the remaining white space with green water color, then stamp with mat board scraps in green tempera. 

3. Insect Study-- students drew 1 large ladybug and 3 or more small ladybugs. 

4. I hot glued the magnifying glasses above the big ladybugs to show how they work. 

Students who had extra time added on a grasshopper. 

Lastly we made a hand and arm (one of my first grader's ideas!! so great!).