Cats a la Klimt

Kindergarten art students just finished up a lesson about the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. They learned that he not only loved the color gold and swirly lines, but cats too! Inspired by his art, they created cat collages!

Chinese New Year in the Bradfield Art Room

Third grade and Kindergarten students have both been learning about the tradition of Chinese New Year. 

Third graders are building dragon puppets from papier-mache. They don't look anything like dragons yet, but hopefully in a few weeks they will look more like this:

This week, they are working on building an armature from newspaper and cardboard:

Armatures ready for papier-mache!

According to the Chinese calendar, this year is the Year of the Rabbit.

In Kindergarten art classes, students have been learning how to draw a rabbit!

Happy New Year!

Trees in 3-D

Last week, Kindergarten students created Fall tree collages on paper. This week, they took their study of trees a step further by creating these fabulous tree sculptures. They learned that a sculpture is an artwork that has a top, bottom and two sides. You can walk around a sculpture and see it from many different viewpoints. A person who makes a sculpture is called a sculptor. 

Students sculpted their trees by twisting and turning brown paper bags. They added leaves using tissue paper and glue.

A Completed Tree

FALL is in the Art

Kindergartners learned how artists express the season of Fall in their work. They looked at many paintings of Fall trees like this one by Vincent Van Gogh:

Then, they created leaves using texture rubbings, collage and oil pastel. 
They used the drip painting method to "grow" their tree trunks and branches. 

Here are a few of the finished products:

Kindergarten Plays with Line

Kindergarten students are learning all about line this week in art. 

They have learned about different types of line like horizontal, vertical and diagonal. 

They looked at how famous artists used overlapping lines and patterns like in these works of art below:

Here, they are experimenting with overlapping lines and making patterns:

They will also be creating an artwork inspired by Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (see above).

Stay tuned!

Kindergarten Self Portraits

Kindergarten art students have been learning about the art of self-portraiture this week. First, they created a collage for the colorful backgrounds. Then, they focused on contour line and facial proportion when drawing their faces. They looked in mirrors as they drew so they could really "see" what they looked like.

Kindergarten Klimts

The Tree of Life


One of my favorite artists is Gustav Klimt and I love teaching about him and his artwork to my Kindergarten students.

Klimt was an animal lover and so that is a great way to begin introducing him to five year olds. There is a cute book called Klimt and His Cat, by Berenice Capatti, that I read to the kids.
In fact, I'm thinking about having the kids draw and paint a cat, "Klimt style" for next year.
I think that might be fun.

This year, the students worked with color, line and shape inspired by Klimt.

So, of course we use a lot of GOLD.

...and SWIRLY lines...

We focus on ovals, circles, squares and rectangles.

We also talk about OVERLAPPING.



And then it is time for them to get started!


To begin, they used silver Sharpie markers to fill their gold paper with swirly lines.



Next, they cut and paste shapes from silver, black and white paper...







They finish by painting more swirls with gold paint.






Here are two finished artworks. The first one is very linear, almost symmetrical. The second one is very expressionistic.

You can see that kids think very differently from each other, even though I am teaching them the same concepts.

That is what makes teaching art so fun!