21 Art Lessons with the Theme of Love!

Who's ready to kick off this new year with a whole lotta love, color and bright, fun lessons? BUT who's also not done any real thinkin' about said lessons?! If you said ME to both of those questions than I gotta tell ya, YOU AND ME BOTH. Luckily, I've done a whole lotta love lessons over the years and put all 21 of 'em right here in this blog post. If you follow the links to these, you'll find videos for most and lesson details for ll of them. Have fun creating!

Learn how to draw each of these cuties in these how to draw videos, found here! 

Kindergarten tried their hand at printing with this project and had such a blast! 

These relief hearts by kindergarten were a hit and definitely a lesson I hope to repeat soon! 

Of course, you can't celebrate all things love and Valentines-y without sharing the work of Chris Uphues with your students! We've done a couple lessons inspired by him. This one is a collage and printing project. 

This lesson has always been a hit on my blog with other art teachers and my students. In fact, I created this lesson as a sub plan so it's been a hit with my subs too! You can find all the details and video here.

My students created this HUGE collaborative mural inspired buy Britto. Lesson video here!

First grade created these huge Britto-inspired hearts with bingo daubers, bleeding tissue paper and paint sticks. Lesson details here. 

Ready to tackle printmaking with your students? Here's a lesson I've done a couple of years now with my second graders: Robert Indiana-inspired LOVE prints! 

I created these hearts with wings with foil, Celluclay and plaster strips! They are super simple to make. More here. 

Inspired by those hearts, I created a lesson for my second graders to make these! 

A couple of years ago, I did a professional development with the faculty and staff at my school. We created these My Heart Has Wings sculptures. Details here. 

Here was a fun lesson where we were able to use our messy mats as apart of our masterpiece! Not only that but this project provided two heart-tastic pieces for the price of one. These...

And these!

If you are looking to have your students create a large collaborative piece, you can see what each grade level worked on to make this piece here. 

Looking for a quick lesson that introduces students to three contemporary artists who used love and hearts as their theme? Check out this blog post with a video lesson! 

James Rizzi is always a fun artist to share with your students. We loved creating these love birds!

Here's another lesson we do just about every year in first grade: these woven and stitched hearts! All the lesson details can be found here. I created a variation of this lesson recently where students weave together strips of paper in their skin tones. You can find it here. 

These candy hearts were created by my fourth graders and we used plaster strips to create them. It was so fun to see these all come together and display them in a large candy heart box! Lesson details here. 

Early finishers of the candy hearts lesson moved onto this project when they were finished! 

Wow, did the third graders have a blast with this one! We made plaster chocolates that looked good enough to eat! All the lesson details here. 

Need a quick lesson with a contemporary artist inspiration? Try this JGoldcrown lesson on for size!

Toilet Paper Tube Crafts!

Today I thought I'd share some of my favorite lessons and projects created with the lowly toilet paper tube! I'll share the link to each of these projects so you can learn more details so be sure and click if you have more questions. If it's one thing we all probably have plenty of right now...it's TP tubes! 

I did this project with my...FIRST GRADERS, y'all! And they knocked it out in just two thirty minute art classes. Here's the video:

I'm guessing most of you don't have plaster strips at home. I know I don't! An easy papier mache recipe would be just a mixture of flour and water. Dip strips of torn newspaper into the mixture and use that as your plaster. The mixture should have a paste-like consistency. No measurements required!

Did you know you can make a castle with toilet paper tubes? My fourth graders created these beauties one year and loved it! All the lesson details here. 

What the world needs now is LOVE LOVE LOVE! You can create all kinds of prints with a toilet paper tube but printing hearts is probably my favorite. You can learn more about it here as well as some fun guided drawing projects! 

Got paper towel tubes? Well, you can make crayons too! Here's how the armature was created:

And if you have cereal boxes, you could even make some decor for your art room!

I have these hanging in my art room and my kids love them. I added a little spot of velcro to the backs of the crayons so they could be removed and shared with my students.

Last year we had an INSANE Pirate Art Show (like, it was the coolest thing ever, I'm not even gonna try to be humble about it. The kids ROCKED it). One of the projects we did was make pirate ships with toilet paper tube sails. Kids could create the ships with air dry, homemade or even modeling clay! A straw and tubes were added for the sails. Here's more of our art show. 

Want a seriously simple TP craft? Well, check this one out:

I also did this project with my students and it was a hit! Here's the demo video:

And here's what my students created:

 This was apart of a collection of handmade art supplies from our art show a couple of years ago. Here's a tour:

We even made "glue sticks" from toilet paper tubes! 

I hope that gives you some fun ideas for creating with TP tubes! Have fun, y'all!

Printingmaking Made Easy!

Since I've spent the last couple of weeks in Printmaking Land with my second and third graders, I thought I'd share everything I know about printmaking in the elementary art room! I started to record a podcast episode which quickly turned into TWO podcast episodes. There's a lot to printmaking in the elementary art room but none of it is scary, difficult or even all that messy! My kids love it and so do I. So I'll be sharing both podcast episodes here as well as my favorite lessons. Be sure and click the link as it will take you directly to the lessons which often feature a video for you and your students!

In the first episode in this series, I focus a lot on printing with Styrofoam sheets. They are a great alternative to having small children carve into linoleum or wood blocks (lord, I can see the lawsuit now!) and can produce beautiful results. Here's everything I could think of about printing with Styrofoam sheets!

My favorite tip is to have kids use ink pens when incising the lines into the foam. I have them use a blue pen first and a black pen second. This ensures that they'll incise the lines deeply enough by doing it twice. When I see the black ink pen, I know they've traced their lines not once but twice. 

In this episode, I talk a lot about supplies and set up. Here's a visual! My second graders are doing a rainbow roll in this photo. Notice the dollops of ink at the top of the tray where they are to dip their brayer, not roll through the ink. Then, in the space below, they are to roll their brayer up and down only (so as not to mix the colors) to cover the brayer before rolling it onto their printing plate. Messy mats are used to help keep the table clean. Students also place all of their prints on the messy mat during clean up (without stacking them as they will stick together) and slide the entire mat onto our drying rack. Then we toss our printing plates in one sink, brayers and trays in another for me to do a quick wash after school.

In the episode, I also mention printing on newspapers, painted papers, wrapping paper, metallic papers and much more. The results are stunning!

 

In the follow-up episode, I talk about printing in 30-minute classes. On the first day, we do a single color print like these third-grade robots you see here. The following art class, we do a rainbow roll like you saw above. 

 On our third day of printing, we spend a hot minute adding more designs to our printing plates before doing a reduction print. The kids were fascinated by this process. 

And on the last day, we make these! Never throw away those printing plates or simply send them home. You can make such cool works of art with them with inexpensive foil sheets, steel wool and spray paint. Take a listen to find out how!

 Third Grade Cities! This lesson was a hit as the kids were allowed to swap cities to create some diversity in their finished piece. The complete lesson in the link!

Winter Portraits by Second Grade  Need a fun way to introduce printmaking and patterns?  Check out this self-portrait project!

Egyptian God Portraits Fourth grade students used their knowledge of Egyptian gods and symbols to print the designs in the background of these portraits. 

Positive Four Letter Word Collages with Prints! This is a lesson I return to year after year and seem to change and tweek each time. You can see alternatives to this lesson here. 

Gelatin Prints  I don't do this kind of printing anymore with homemade gelatin printing plates for a couple of reasons: I don't like using the gelatin (it's an animal product that I'm not comfortable using) and it's labor-intensive. BUT the results! There are recipes for making your own more permanent printing plates that don't seem to be difficult at all. I found several on YouTube. 

 Sushi Collage with Gelli-Plate Prints I do have a class set of Gelli-Plates and we love them. The best thing to do is just let your kids go crazy exploring different methods of printing on the surface with stencils and texture and color. In the end, you'll have a fun stack of papers like you see below that can then be used to create collages like you see above!

 If you would like a video to walk you through more of these processes, be sure and check out this blog post! 

Collagraph Prints are ones created by adding things to a surface. This is different that the Styrofoam prints which are a subtractive kind of printing. Collagraphs are additive. My fourth graders created these prints a couple years ago in celebration of dot day!  

That project was very similar to one I did just last year with my kindergarten friends! We used foam hearts from the Dollar Tree as the base and sticky-backed foam stickers for the design. You can see the complete lesson here. 

 We collaged our completed hearts for these sweet masterpieces.

We then wrapped our lesson by wrapping our hearts and doing a little burnishing as I mentioned at the start of this blog post! I hope that gives you a bunch of ideas for printmaking in your art room and removes any fear that you may have! Happy Printing!