Cassie Stephens: projects for middle school

Thursday, February 8, 2018

In the Art Room: Dean Russo-Inspired Tigers with Third Grade!

Whenever I share a lesson on this blog before having done the lesson with my students, I always like to share a follow-up post. Cuz, you know, lessons don't always go as we think they will. Or maybe the kids don't respond as excitedly as you'd hoped. Well, thankfully, neither was the case with this Dean Russo-Inspired Colorful Tiger lesson. My students LOVED it, they were so stinkin' proud of themselves and I was just beyond thrilled to share them with y'all!

In case you missed the details of this lesson and the supplies we used, you can find all that info here. This lesson took about two and a half-ish (pending on the artist!) art classes. On our first day, we did a guided drawing of a tiger after we'd wrapped up a sketchbook prompt. We worked BIG on 18" squares of paper. We also used bingo daubers filled with India ink. Here's the video lesson I created to share with you and my students:

The kids were super excited by Dean Russo's art. The loved his subject matter (animals!), bold colors and patterns. Our school mascot is a tiger so that's why we went the route we did. As my students get older, I do fewer and fewer guided drawings with them. This will probably be our only one this year. We had a blast creating them.

We didn't draw in pencil first and we didn't get new papers if we "messed up". These guys are familiar with the book Beautiful Oops and are very good at applying that mindset.

By our second class, we were ready to use chalk and starch. If you aren't familiar with the magic that is chalk and starch, check out the video above. Total game changer.

About half of the kids finished the chalk portion on the second day. On the third day, they finished off the chalk and then dived right in with the oil pastels. I told them that if their paper had wet areas due to the starch not to draw on those areas with oil pastel. I gave them a deadline: THIS IS OUR LAST DAY! That seemed to inspire my pokey lil puppies to complete their masterpiece. Our carrot was that we are sewing in the following art classes so they needed to step on it!

I was tempted to have them add something to the background but in the end, I really thought the white made their tigers look even more amazing. Plus we were ready to move on.

For display, I knew that if I just hung them on our blah colored walls, they would just fade into the background. So I raided the workroom and walked out with armfuls of colorful bulletin board paper.

Ah!! LOVE all of those line details in oil pastel!

Obviously this artist was not havin' that all white background!

I really loved having the kids work big. The biggest we normally work is the size of construction paper: 12" X 18". Creating bigger just might be my new favorite thing. Ima need a bigger art room tho!