Third Grade Family Paintings

Family is a popular subject matter in artworks by Mary Cassatt, Romare Bearden and Carmen Lomas Garza. Third grade art classes have been expressing their feelings about family and friendship by creating paintings that depict a scene from a family tradition or daily routine.

Here are some of the paintings in progress. They are turning out great!

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:

Summer Memories...

How is it already time to go back to school? Summer flew by so fast! Well, in art class, we are hanging on to Summer for just a little longer.

Fourth graders have been remembering all of the fun picnics and BBQ they had this Summer while looking at Stephen Frykholm's graphic design posters for the Herman Miller Summer Picnic series. They are learning about how to communicate messages without using words-Not an easy thing to do!

Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse represented their Summer memories in very different ways:

"Farm in Normandy Summer" by Paul Cezanne

"Swimming Pool" by Henri Matisse

Third graders are drawing pictures of their Summer memories and framing them in a cool pair of shades. A very cute idea I found at That Artist Woman.

I can't wait to see their final designs.
They are having so much fun!

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!