fifth grade naturalists

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
-Henry David Thoreau

Each fifth grade artist used one of his/her own photographs taken on our photography field trip to the beautiful Missouri Botanical Gardens to use as inspiration for a drawing, ceramic sculpture, and painting. This is a rigorous exercise in observation and perspective! It is also a wonderful way to experiment in different mediums to discover new strengths and work with challenges.

For the drawing portion of this project, students learned how to make a value chart and show roundness of form using shading, highlights, and shadow with special 2H-6B drawing pencils. They chose to render their full photograph, a portion of the photograph, or to abstract the photograph.

sixth grade color investigation paintings

I love these free form color investigations! I first saw this project here created by Olivia Gude (love all of her work).

The directions are simple (download the complete project details here):
1. Choose a shape and make it your mark in your painting.
2. Choose a hue. Make many variations of your color without it becoming a different color. Push green until someone calls it blue!
3. Vary the color in hue, value, and chroma.
4. Now choose another hue and use variations as an accent.

The sixth graders did a beautiful job with their color investigations. I certainly enjoyed hearing the excitement and joy of new discoveries being shared along the way. Not wanting to waste any of their color combinations at the end of class, some of them even made abstract monoprints from their color mixing palettes!