Blue Dog

We read Why is Blue Dog Blue? by George Rodrigue. We really enjoy his style of drawing blue dog and the imagination, creativity and whimsy that this artist exhibits in his work. We are creating our own dog art, trying to match the style of Blue Dog. We will be painting our dogs with colors that we mix with tempera paint.

Mandalas

A mandala is a piece of art that has radial symmetry. Several different cultures create mandalas, including Tibetan monks, who create them using colored sand.  Rose windows in churches are another example of a mandala. We traced circle templates and cut them out. Then we folded our paper 3 times to create 8 equal sections. We created designs inside them with sharpie markers. Whatever was added to one section, needed to be added to each of the sections, paying special attention to the size and placement of all of our lines and shapes. 

National Art Education Association

Click here to visit their website.

Michigan Art Education Association

Click here to visit their website.

Jacob Lawrence Movement Collage

We learned about Harlem Renaissance artist Jacob Lawrence. We were inspired by his painting of olympic runners in our figures in motion collage. We had the option to cut or tear construction paper to create our collage. We spend a lot of time trying to create the effect of a person in an action pose. We spent several weeks on this projects and are very proud of the results!

Georgia O'Keeffe

We're studying the art of Geogia O'Keeffe. She loved nature, and when she moved to New Mexico she spent a lot of time painting in the desert. One of her favorite things to paint was the skulls and animal bones she found. Students are learning about skulls in science class and we thought some skull paintings would be an excellent connection between art and science. We are viewing them are part of nature and are not meant to be scary.

2nd Grade Paper Weaving

We learned about warm and cool colors. We painted two papers with watercolors, one with warm colors and the other with cool colors. Then we cut them apart and wove them together.

Mondrian Grids

We learned about Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. He liked to create grids and fill them with primary colors (red, yellow and blue) as well as white and black. We tried to balance the visual weight of the colors and had fun deciding where to put each color. We did the same by creating our own grids with a ruler. We used oil pastels to add color to our art. Below are some images of works in progress.

learn more at: http://makingartfun.com/htm/f-maf-art-library/piet-mondrian-biography.htm

.

Picasso Portraits

These Cubist portraits will be going in our artist books. We added color with oil pastels.