Showing posts with label self portrait lesson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self portrait lesson. Show all posts

Monday, May 6, 2013

In the Art Room: Royal First Graders

 Well hello there, your majesties! Long time, no bloggie'ness. I know you might have been expecting some Parisian photo-heavy post but, to be honest, I'm kinda overwhelmed by just the thought of downloading all two million of the photos that I snapped. And that was of the Eiffel Tower alone! So you're gonna have to wait for the European Vacation Slide Show and check out these amazing first grade self portraits. Cuz they're royally awesome, dude.
 This project involved many mini-lessons as most of my projects do. I just can't seem to do a weaving project or a lesson on symmetry. No, it's gotta be a self-portrait-drawing-, symmetrical-crown-making-, textured-paper-weaving-, analogous-color-mixing-, and pattern-designing- kind of montage.
 Wanna attempt a project that involves that many steps? You sure you can handle this kind of party? Cuz it ain't for the short attention-spanded. But if you and your little friends are up for the challenge, here's how we went about mastering these pieces:
  • Week 1: As you may recall, as it's mentioned every blog post, I only hang out with my wee artist friends 30 minutes, twice a week. So I'm going to break this down by week. Now this lesson was apart of our unit on the United Kingdom. After a chat about their monarchy and a close look at several paintings of royalty of the past, the kids were introduced to the idea that they'd be portraying themselves as kings and queens. This was met with the usual squeals of delight that one only hears when teaching the littles. To start, we used 8 1/2" X 11" sheets of paper, traced a head shape in pencil, added a neck and ears and proceeded to paint using colors that matched our own skin tone. Once those dried, we used oil pastels to create out likeness. That's after a pretty extensive how-to-draw-a-self-portrait chat, of course.
  •  Week 2: Once the oil pastel self-portraits were completed, they were cut out of the small sheet of paper and glued onto a clean sheet of 12" X 18". Once glued down, the kids used mirrors to check out their 'do and painted hair onto their self-portraits. For the boys, hair painting, as we called it, took all of two seconds. But for the ladies, well, let's just say we enjoyed the beauty salon time. During the second half of our weekly art lesson, we used metallic paint to paint and add texture to small 6' X 9' pieces of colorful construction paper.
  • Week 3: With our fancy paper, we created a loom for weaving. To do this, I have the kids fold the paper in half and fold a small crease at the top open edge. We have a mini-math lesson that involves cutting the paper almost in half, making sure to stop at that top crease. We then proceed to cut the paper almost in fourths and then eighths. Once the paper is unfolded, it creates a loom. The following art class was spent weaving on our looms.
  •  Week 4: Crown making! This proved to be a bit hit with the kids...and it also helped me empty out some contents of my storage closet. After cutting out their preferred crown shape (the kids were given three different crown shapes to trace from), they added foamy shapes to create their design. They were informed that they only had two rules to follow: the crowns had to be symmetrical by shape and they could not stack more than three shapes on top of each other. Once complete, crowns were spray painted gold and more foamy shapes could be added on top.
  •  Week 5: We began the process of putting it all together. Crowns were glued atop heads. Weavings were glued under chins. Sleeves were added with rectangles of paper embellished with metallic oil pastels. Fancy collars were coffee filters folded in half with the center circle cut out. And necklaces were created with construction paper and metallic doilies found in my storage closet.
  •  Week 6: Finally, we began to approach light at the end of the tunnel. The kids were given water soluble oil pastels. They were asked to use two analogous colors and create lines that radiated from their self portrait. The following day, water was painted over their line drawings and their masterpieces were complete. Finally.

 I don't know if you noticed, but some of the kids took liberties with the coffee filters, creating fancy sleeves. And some of the ladies added earrings with the metallic doilies. Who am I to deny royalty of their magnificence?
I do believe the kids fave part of this project is when I passed their work back. I called on the kids as "Your Royal Highness" and "His/Her Majesty" to which they always giggled, curtsied or bowed. And who can blame them? After all this hard work, they are most definitely Kings and Queens of the art room. 

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Thursday, February 7, 2013

In the Art Room: Kindergarten Self-Portraits as Artists

If you've ever been in art school, then you know there's always that one dude that's always givin' the girls that one look. Thankfully, on a kindergartener, it's rather cute.
 Greetings from kindergarten-land! My wee artists finished off these self-portraits last week and I'm so excited to share them with you. My kinder-artists create a self-portrait every year but this time I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted them to portray themselves as artists, complete with apron, paint palette and brush.
Yes, that is a paint brush. Not...anything else it might resemble. Note to self: next year, have the kids paint the brushes brown to make them appear less doobie-esque.
 I began this portrait lesson as I do every year, with a reading of The Colors of Us. I love how the author chats about how we are all different and beautiful colors, even equating our coloring to delicious foods. After that, the kids return to their seats and trace a head shape onto their paper to which they add a neck and ears. From there they chose a color from a variety that is the color of them. Once painted, these are put on the drying rack until next time.
To the kids, I refer to this as Funny Faced Fred but behind his back, I call him Freak Face. Again, kinda reminds me of the creeper dudes in my art classes. I mean, just check out his myspace page (ha, made you look). Despite the crazy looks, this silliness really does teach them a great deal about expressions. And, of course, they love Fred.
 The following art class is spent looking at a variety of portraits. After chatting about those, I bust out Fred to talk about how we might portray our emotions. Once I give a demo, the kids set to work on their self-portraits with oil pastels. 

From there, we cut out the self-portraits from the original paper and glue to them to a 12" X 18" piece of white paper. We spend more time looking at ourselves in the mirrors to see how we might paint our hair. On our portrait, that is. Although we do our fair share of getting paint where it shouldn't be in Kindergartenland.
I know what you are thinking: What's with the blacked out teeth? Well, five years of age is when we start losing our teeth...and it is an event that must be documented. So we always block out our most recent tooth loses.

With our portrait portion complete, we move on to "getting dressed for art". The kids added a 12" X 6" piece of construction paper that they had rounded the shoulders and created a collar for. I recycled our messy mats and turned them into aprons that the kids glued to their shirts. 
Creating the paint palette turned out to be a wonderful review of color mixing and our friend Roy G. Biv. Once that dried, we added it, our paint brush (an art straw that we frayed and colored one end of) and a die cut hand (after three weeks in self-portrait town, I was not willing to spend an art class having them trace and cut out their own hands). 

Our last step was to recall our study of lines and patterns from the beginning of the school year. Using our tempra cakes, we decorated the background and, ta-da! one adorable self-portrait as artist complete. 

After we finished, I had this exchange with one of my students:

Little Dude: Mrs. Stephens, I am going to be an art teacher when I am big, just like you!

Me: Cool! And then I can retire and paint all day.

L.D.: What does retire mean?

Me: It means I don't teach anymore.

L.D.: But you can't do that! I am going to teach in the art room with you!

Well, shoot! How can I ever retire now? I mean, how much fun would it be to teach with one of your students? Well...on second thought...

Thanks for dropping by!
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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

In the Art Room: We are the World

Okay, this is gonna totally date me, but I was 10 years old when a group of the biggest 1980's celebrities gathered together to sing "We are the World". That was 1985 and I remember so many things about that year: my brother was born, forever ending my "only child" status; Haley's Comet made it's every-75-year appearance; my fifth grade teacher encouraged my love of creating and I loved her for that; a month into 1986, we watched in horror as the Challenger exploded. And the rock stars of the  mid-80's lead us all to believe that we could change the world. That's a lot of memories to pack into one year.
A World of Artists

I'm sorry. Maybe it's the weather, but I'm feeling sentimental of late. And this mural created by the students, faculty and staff of my school reminded me of that song. I can still see Bruce Springsteen (my all time fave), Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie (who both penned the tune), Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper and so many others singing and swaying. 

But silly me. This is an "In the Art Room" post, not a kumbaya/hand holding session. I best digress before I become a mushy mess of memories.


Let's talk about the map, shall we? Every new school year, the kids create one big school mural together. Last year, we did the Self-Portrait/Rainbow Mural that is all over pinterest. It was a hit. I knew I wanted to do another mural that would tie in with our travel theme. A map of the world seemed like the answer. To begin, each student created a self-portrait in pencil and traced over it in Sharpie on a 3" X 3" piece of paper.

From there, students were given either all blue, green or yellow colored pencils and markers to color their mini-portrait. After looking at a map, students understood that they were either going to be in the water, on the land or apart of the frame.
I did some (very bad) calculations to come up with the size of the map. I was off. Way off. I'll show you how I attempted to correct that in a moment.
As the kids began finishing their portraits, I began gluing them to the map. As it filled up, some kids volunteered to use half green and half blue to be apart of the coastline. I placed their drawings on the map and lightly drew in pencil where the blue and green should be.

As you can see, once the portraits were glued, it was difficult to visually separate the land from the water. This had me seriously perplexed.
You might notice that some self-portraits were created on blue copy paper. Those were created by our faculty and staff in a pinch at a faculty meeting. The kids have loved seeing the drawings created by their teachers.
Thankfully, I've had this great group of art education students hanging out in my room a couple times a week. They volunteered to finish gluing down all of those little masterpieces. They also came up with the idea of outlining the continents to make them more prominent. That college education is really payin' off for them, don't you think?

Oh, look! It's Europe, our destination for this school year. Since having snapped these photos. I've made a little yellow dot with a string attached to show just where we are headed first. Paris, France, ya'll!
Those lovely college girls also crafted this nifty grid so the kids can (hopefully) find their self-portrait. Although they mostly just come up to me and say, "Where am I?" To which I reply, "Why, you are all over the world!"
Okay, so I did the math and came up with a 6' X 5' dimension. I drew out the map, painted it and was pretty proud of my mad multiplication skillz. And then, completely forgetting about my calculations, I decided to have the kids create this yellow border. Which lead to a whole lotta South Pacific emptiness. 

Solution? A compass rose. The kids learn about them later in the year...and it sure turned out pretty, if I do say so. Not only that, but I now have room for new kids to add their drawing to the mix. So, happy accident, says me.
Do you think we are just a little excited about our Parisian Adventure?
And there you have it, one We are the World complete. Thank you for indulging my memory lane stroll. Now I'm off to youtube to enjoy those mushy feel-good memories.


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