Surrealist Collage

This is a very fun unit. We began with a PowerPoint on Surrealism and surrealist artists, such as Dali. I then had the students choose from some pre-cut magazine pictures (or you could have them search magazines to cut them out), and then they changed the pictures so that they had surreal qualities. I had them draw with crayon to make them no longer look normal/real. The kids became very creative and thought it was fun to take a silly look on surrealism.

Van Gogh Bouquet

This is one of the most interesting projects when it is complete. We started our bouquets after learning about Van Gogh and texture. We created texture on our bouquets by putting a line of glue over all the lines in our sketch. After it dried, we filled everything in with chalk pastels and then went over the glue lines with a roller of black paint. This is just one of a ton of amazing lessons in my favoite art project book. *to make things a lot easier, test to make sure your glue isn't too watery. If it is, it will dry flat.

Western Sunset

After learning about C.M. Russell, I had my 2nd graders do this project. It was a great practice for doing watercolors washes. We did a warm color wash on watercolor paper and while it dried, we drew and cut out our southwest sillhouettes on black construction paper. I found this ideas in this book. It's a great resource.

O'Keefe Flowers

My unfinished example

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A student's work (just needs a background)

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After learning about Georgia O'keefe and looking at some of her work, our class made large flowers with oil pastels in O'keefe's style. This was a good practice with oil pastels. The kids really enjoyed blending the colors.

Stained "Glass"

This project is going amazingly! I taught my 4th graders about Louis Comfort Tiffany and then introduced this neat project. We use overhead transparencies and sharpie markers to complete this project. I have the kids first sketch out their picture and then trace it right onto the transparency sheet. This trick is making it look like stained glass by not leaving any big blank spaces.An idea sheet I let the kids look at and use

I almost when blind taking these pictures, it was so sunny out

Cave Art

I did this project with my first graders. We had a lot of fun. As part of the intro to the project, we visited this site and I projected it on the SmartBoard and let the kids come up and interact with it. The kids LOVED it and now I use it as an incentive to get them to behave in class (ie: If you guys all work hard and get done on time, we can visit the cave again:) ) They also enjoyed crumpling up their pictures to give them texture and make them look old.