 Coming from the Caribbean, where we experience the wet and dry seasons, we are all familiar with the gorgeous parade of colours that burst onto the landscape every year between the months of January and May (the dry season). This year my Picassos are looking at perspective and in particular the vanishing point, but to make it beautiful and to give them a local context we imagined a street lined with these richly coloured trees in full bloom! I used the pic up top to show them the vanishing point and so they could get a real example of how things appear smaller the further back they go. Unfortunately I couldn't find real a poui-lined street :/ Of course they took a while to get the concept of drawing at an angle and decreasing in size but the end result... well see for yourself!
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Sailboats make a great subject for art lessons. Their recognizable shape makes it easy to introduce many art techniques. For this lesson, our primary focus is a line drawing and color wheel exploration. To get started they had to draw out our scene, this means recognizing and making their shapes and getting them all in the right place. Then, the children were given an opportunity to paint shapes with the primary colors. Next came the part that always fills students with wonder: color mixing! They mixed secondary colors to fill in the rest of their artwork. Finally, we added the element of space with a simple horizon line and sun. Check out their lovely masterpieces! Last day the children listened to a lovely story Over and Under the Pond. The mother tells her son there's a secret world underneath their boat, a world of minnows, crayfish, turtles, bullfrogs, and tadpoles slowly growing into frogs, learning how to hop on newly developed legs. So today we are adding the details! Lots of drawing, cutting and sticking and they each decided what animals they wanted to add and where to place them. Then they cut them out and collaged them onto their background.  The Warhols are starting off the term with a little history... Art history and local Trini history. They learnt about Impressionism today. Claude Monet was the first painter in the Impressionist movement. The word IMPRESSIONISM comes from one of Monet’s first paintings called Impression: Sunrise. Because sunlight is always shifting, Monet decided to paint the same scenes over and over to show how the color changes as the light moved. He was pretty determined, too. He painted over 30 paintings of a cathedral on France. Each painting shows how the light effects not only the cathedral’s color but also how light affects the details in the architecture. He set up a series of easels and used different paint colors to paint the cathedral at dawn, mid-day and a sunset. Art critics labelled the painting, impressionism, in order to mock it but the term stuck. It now means painting with light. Monet and other Impressionist had many things in common: they all painted outdoors, used photography to influence their art, wrote about their ideas and used color in a new and different way. Unfortunately we aren't able to paint outdoors, but we can mimic the characteristic elements of Impressionist work by focusing on the use of light as well as the quick gestural brushstrokes of Impressionist painters. As for our local history... well! Chacachacare which is an island off the coast of Trinidad (actually it's only 7 miles from Venezuela but it is T&T territory.) is only about 900 acres of hilly and thickly forested terrain. All that's left of the few structures now are the remains of the house pictured above. During the course of it's history it has served as a cotton plantation, a whaling station and a hospital for a small leper colony. There was once a small convent and cemetery close by that is now almost completely overrun. This is the subject of our piece. The children will draw and paint this fascinating place in the Impressionist style.  This lesson was inspired by artist Sandra Silberzweig. That's her piece in the picture. The main focus of this lesson is to teach children how to create tints and shades using tempera paint. But creating the tints and shades is quite easy, what is more difficult is establishing a prominent positive space with the fish. Especially when colours are everywhere... it's easy for a piece of art to get hard to look at it seems unsettling. To avoid this Silberzweig uses mostly cool colours on the fish and warm colours in the background. She also emphases unity and balance in the art piece by enforcing the RULE OF THREE... so there are 3 large fish and 3 smaller ones. Also the fishes are tied together using colour, whereas the background is multicoloured. Watch as the Warhols explore, line, shape, colour, movement and balance! A whole heap of Elements and Principles of Art to create some beautiful masterpieces.  Based on the book The Honeybee by Kirsten Hall, the Doodlebugs drew a simple honeybee and created a beautiful soft pastel background. Science & Nature Connection: We talked about how honeybees are important in nature because they pollinate fruit, vegetables and flowers. They learnt that pollination causes plants to produce seeds, which is a key part of the life cycle of plants. We also discovered with the help of this delightful book that honeybees live in a hive where there is one queen bee, lots of female worker bees and male bees called drones. The worker bees are the bees that leave the hive to search for pollen and nectar. If you see a honeybee, you don’t have to be afraid. Though the bee has a stinger, she will only use it if she is threatened. She is out looking for food and she is not interested in people!  We're starting off the term with this gorgeously illustrated picture book as the inspiration for our art piece. The story follows a curious young boy and his mother as they paddle across a pond. We get the chance to talk about ecosystems and food chains and how the cycle of life is all connected. For our art piece, the Picassos have started to draw and paint their pond ecosystems and in our next class they will add details like leaves, rocks and of course some animal life! Check out what they've done so far! |
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Be a fly on the wall in our art room! Take a look at what we do, how we do it and the smiles that I get to see week after week :) Archives
February 2020
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