Painted Color Wheels

Middle School - Elements of Art: COLOR

After all that practice mixing colors with the Value Scales and Robots, students were ready to create their own color wheel.

We learned about all the colors, their places on the wheel, names of various categories of colors, and practice coloring one with color pencil. Whew! Finally, we were ready to tackle the real color wheel.

Students had to decide on a theme and come up with a variety of drawings to create the wheel. Once drawn, each color had to be assigned to its proper placement.

Dragon Puppets For Chinese New Year

Middle School - Craft

The Chinese New Year for 2016 fell on Feb. 8th. It's the year of the Monkey.

We discussed similarities and differences between the traditional Chinese calendar and the western calendar. Each kid got to find out what animal they were born under. I also read the characteristics for each of the animals represented in the room, creating a few laughter among the group.

Value Robots

Middle School - Elements of Art: Value

For this unit we talked a lot about value, meaning going from light to dark or dark to light.
Kids practiced this concept first with pencil, then with 1 color plus black and white, to create the value scale you see below.

The first row is black and white paint mixed to create the various values of grays.
The second row is the color, blue in this case, mixed with white, and the third is blue mixed with black.






Once all those steps were complete, the kids were ready to draw their robots!

Dynamic Masking Tape Sculpture

Middle School - Sculpture

As our last project before the Christmas holiday, I thought it'd be cool to do a 3-D project of some kind. We are finishing up on our Shape & Form Unit, so what better way to explore form than through sculpture?

The key terms for this project are STATIC and DYNAMIC.

I give you: A Dynamic Sculpture!
Some may be more dynamic than others, and they're ALL nonetheless amazing.

This was so much fun to do, and ho what a mess! And so worth it!!! I'm sure you'll agree as you go through the result below.

Snowman And Reindeer Pompoms

Middle School - Craft

For the Christmas season, kids that were done with their Snowflake (link soon) and other assignments had the option of making a pompom snowman, reindeer and/or Santa.

We got a whole herd of reindeer and several snowmen but only one Santa. A few sheep where thrown in there too for good measure. There were pieces of yarn everywhere!

The kids were overjoyed with their creations, myself as well, as they are the cutest things. Notice "cool Santa" has sun glasses on and so does his reindeer.

Halloween Monster Faces

Middle School -

This is the first Halloween project we've done this year: Monster Faces!

Kids start with folding a piece of card stock in half and cutting out a mouth - this can be in any style desired, with or without teeth. By unfolding the card stock and pushing the mouth part forward, kids then draw a face around it to create their monster(s).

Any Halloween / horror character was allowed.

 

Warm Cool Protractors

Middle School

The idea with this coloring project was to practice control of a color pencil, with shapes being colored in from light to dark and dark to light. We were also talking about warm and cool colors so that element was added to the project.


We simply traced multiple protractors onto the paper, keeping overlapping lines visible. In addition to going from light to dark in each shape, kids also had to change from warm to cool colors whenever they went over a line. Once done, we filled in the background with black tempera paint to make the protractors stand out more.

Surprisingly, most kids turned out to have a real hard time with this one. That tells me we need to practice proper coloring techniques more...

Alien Name Bugs

Middle School - Color Pencil

We've been talking about lines a lot lately, so I was looking for something for the kids to do with a colorful line background when I happened on an idea from another blogger - to have kids write their name in cursive and turn it into a bug.

We took that idea and went a couple steps further. First each writes his or her name in cursive on a folded piece of colored construction paper. Then they double up the lines to make the letters "bubble style".

Once the name is carefully cut out, taking care to preserve enough of the fold, the name is glued down, unfolded, onto the line background. Finally, the last step is to add whatever necessary to turn that name into an "Alien Name Bug".

Kids made a game to try and figure out who was who once all the projects were up on the board.

Construction Paper Weave

Middle School -

The construction paper weave is a quick and colorful project. It doesn't take the kids any time to do - 2-3 class time for most kids - and is perfect for a transition between two more intense or attention heavy projects.

I did cut a bunch of strips before hand with the paper cutter, just because I did want these to be straight. For a slightly more advanced group, the kids could start by having to cut the strips themselves, which would also lengthens the required time to complete off course.

The result is an amazing array of colors! I placed no requirements on the colors, patterns or lack thereof, rather leaving it up to the kids to choose for themselves.


It was hard to pick a few to show here.
 

First Project Of The Year part 2

Middle School

This part 2 is for Middle school images of our first project of the year: "Falling Backward Into Space".
If you missed part 1, check out the High School images here.

What I particularly love about the MS's projects is the facial expressions! They had a great time doing this and it shows.