Third-Fourth Grade Drawings

First - Second Grade Drawings

The Oil Pastels Come Out!

This week the students began their final pictures for the Square 1 Art fundraiser. The kids first sketched their designs in pencil and then colored them with oil pastels. We were working on creating simple designs with bold colors. Families will be able to order their child's artwork on a variety of products, from mugs to tiles to cell phone cases. Parents, the order form will go home with students on October 20 and orders will be due the following Thursday.

Oil pastels are great fun to play with at home. My favorite brand can be found on this board. What I like about the Portfolio series is that they can be blended by hand or with a brush and water to achieve a variety of effects. Try using old pastels on dark colored paper, or use a marker to draw a design and color it in with pastels, blending to create paint-like color. Just be sure to have plenty of paper towels on hand. It can be messy work!

Also, check out student artwork on our new Instagram account, thursdayart. I will be showcasing student pieces there each week, so if you are an Instagram user, be sure to follow our class!

Art In Progress

In the last two weeks we have laid the groundwork for several future projects. Students explored a different side of printmaking with rubbings

and made watercolor backgrounds for an upcoming printing.

We took a detour this week and began work on a very special project. The art department is participating in a fundraiser from Square 1 Art. Our Thursday classes will be creating some vibrant oil pastel drawings that you will be able to purchase on tote bags, phone cases, mugs, and several dozen more items. All of the profits will be used to purchase supplies for art class! More information will be sent home in October.

The students planned their drawings with some sketchbook work this week:

Collographs

Today we made collographs, a print made from gluing three dimensional objects to a base. We created cardboard printing plates. The students cut out their own designs, glued them on a cardboard base, and used paint to create a print.

The younger students used adhesive foams shapes instead, as cutting cardboard can be a little difficult.

This is a great art project to do at home when the recycling gets full or you have too many leftover Amazon boxes from buying all of those books you just had to have for homeschool this year! If you'd like to see how a professional artist creates a collograph, check out this website.

The students also got some time to work in the sketchbooks they decorated last week. Today's sketchbook challenge was to invent their own animal.

While shirts seemed to stay a little cleaner today, please remember to send your child in play clothes. Art can be messy business!

Welcome to Art!

Welcome to another year of Thursday art class! Today the students jumped right into our first unit, printmaking, by decorating the covers of their sketchbooks with found stamps. If you'd like to learn a little more about printmaking, you can watch this short YouTube video. These classic printmaking methods, while wonderful, are not practical for the art class. We will be exploring some simpler (and less dangerous) methods over the next four weeks.

If you are looking for suggestions of art supplies and books for the home, check out the link to my Pinterest board on the right. I have not listed art histories or biographies, as there are too many fantastic ones to list, but I will link some here from time to time as they relate to the subject we are currently studying.

Tissue and Castles

The students finished their castles on Thursday using tissue paper to create a watercolor like effect. After outlining their castles with Sharpie markers, they wet their papers and applied squares of colored tissue paper.

The dye transferred from the tissue to the paper, creating masterpieces such as these:

and so many more that you will be able to admire at the Vista Oaks art show! Mark your calendars now for Thursday, March 10. More details as we get closer to the date!