4th grade winter cardinal paintings

This project was a new project for me this year. I found the idea from Pinterest (my new favorite obsession!) that originated from a website called deepspacesparkle.com This art teacher's blog is full of great projects that inspired me to try a bunch of new things this year.
We started out by looking at photographs of cardinals and then we used those pictures, along with a step-by-step drawing paper to help us draw a cardinal. The cardinal was drawn as the main focus of the work and then the branches were added later. I explained this as though you are looking through a camera at a cardinal sitting in a tree and you pushed the zoom button - this is what you would see. The student used tempera paint to paint the bird first. We talked about using a small brush and black paint to create the separation between the wing and the body. We focused a lot on technique and how to hold a paint brush and use a paint brush correctly. Back and forth - not scrubbing! Finally the students used white to show snow on the branches. I am so amazed with how these came out - one of our best projects!!!

1st grade Henri Matisse still life paintings

The first graders learned about the artist Henri Matisse. Matisse loved to paint still life paintings and most of his work included bright colors and bold patterns. After looking at several reproductions of his work, we got to work creating our still life Matisse pictures. The students worked step by step with me as I drew on the board. We used water color paper and pencil to start. We discussed overlapping and the use of pattern. The first graders outlined their drawing with a black Sharpie and then used watercolors to carefully paint their work. We learned that a small amount of water and paint will successfully fill a small part of our picture. If we wanted to fill a larger part, more water would make the paint spread more.
These paintings were outstanding, but were a challenge for some as controlling the amount of water/or paint can be tricky. I was really pleased with all of them and I love how these turn out.

The third graders made these beautiful tree reflection pictures. They folded water color paper in half and painted the bottom half to look like water. We used a water color technique called "wet-on-wet." This is where you get the paints wet and the paper wet, then touch the paint on to the paper. It creates a kind of "fireworks" effect and the paints spread out quickly. On the top half the students drew two trees, painted them brown and as they painted they periodically folded the paper in half to create a "reflection" or a print on the bottom half of the paper. We used small sponges and red, orange, yellow and green paint to blot the leaves on the trees. The paper was then folded in half again to create the reflection of the leaves.
The students did a writing assignment to re-tell what they did in this project step by step. This writing was used as an assessment for the over all project.

The fourth graders continued their study of Pablo Picasso by looking at portraits by this famous Spanish artists. We talked about how we see a face when we look at it from the side and how we see a face when we look at it from the front. We noticed that Picasso often combined both front and side view to create one face. This made for a really abstract piece of art.
The fourth grade made portraits like Picasso's by drawing a front view of a face and a side view of a face and then combining them to create one face. They colored them with marker using solid colors and then decorated the background with various patterns. These are always a lot of fun and they turned out great!