Inspired by how many picture books have been written about Vincent van Gogh and about sunflowers, the junior kindergartener’s continued with their sunflower theme by making sunflower sculptures! They started with plaster gauze, and laying out the petals on a piece of wax paper. The stem was made by wrapping the plaster gauze around a straw. The plaster flowers were left to dry and harden over bowls, to give them their curved shape. Today, the students came and painted their flowers!
The 6th grade just finished learning how to draw and shade 3D volumes. A parent came in one day to teach the students how to fold a single sheet of paper into a 3D pyramid. We are now using all of the pyramids and gluing them together into clusters, and will soon glue all the clusters together. We hope to create one giant, 6th grade, hanging sculpture of pyramids!
The 5th graders are drawing self portraits, only they are drawing themselves as their alter-ego superhero. They have to come up with their positive goal for the world, their one superpower, and a villain.
The students are learning how to draw a human body in correct proportions, which means no more stick people allowed! They are also drawing the human body in action, to learn what happens to those proportions when the pose is changed.
Here are some of the superheros so far, not in action yet!
The 8th graders are beginning what will hopefully become a yearly tradition for our graduating class. They are each creating a tile with their footprint, name, and year; which will be permanently installed throughout the school. Next week they will glaze the tiles, and maybe I can have them installed before their graduation?!
The Junior Kindergarteners have been studying sunflowers in real life as well as Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. They have even been doing taste testing of sunflower seeds! (the roasted and salted kind were a much bigger hit than raw seeds…) In Art, they drew a vase with sunflowers from observation and colored it with chalk pastels. They have also been coming in small groups to create a sunflower using 100 real seeds. And soon, they will create their own 3D plaster sunflower…a great way to wind down the school year!
The second graders are just starting their final project of the school year, already! Today they began observing flowers and drawing as much detail as possible. They looked at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting and answered the question, “Why do you think Georgia painted flowers so large and so zoomed in?” The students agreed that the big size makes the flower seem less fragile, and it allows the artist to show more detail on the flower itself.
Here, they are drawing some silk flowers:
This past Friday was the science fair at school. The Special Start preschool’s table represented a science and art collaboration we did earlier in the school year. Students inquired and inspected an amarylils bulb, predicted what it would look like, and measured its weekly growth. In the art studio, they created the root system, chose the correct bulb shape, and predicted the blossom. Hopefully you had a chance to check out the fair on Friday!
On Evacuation Day, back in March, I visited my fiance’s 4th grade classroom at a Needham elementary school. I introduced the Smile Project and Bren Bataclan to them, along with the Smile Morse paintings 5th graders do at the Morse. The Needham 4th graders created their own small smile paintings, and hid them throughout their school for others to find and keep. Here are a few from their painting day with me!
And, the Smile Morse project is still happening…there are still about 10 more paintings left to be found. Good luck!
Here are some glowing comments from the guestbook at the Morse School Art Show:
“Fabulous work by the Morse students- as usual!”
“Love this event, great job!”
“It was great to see my grandson’s artwork, and I was very impressed with all of the exhibits.”
“Fantabuloso!”
“Wonderful artwork- thank your for supporting Morse School!!”
If you haven’t made it to the Morse School Art Show, you still have 3 days to see the artwork! Here are some photos from last Thursday’s opening. Also, click on the link below to see more pictures.
The Morse Art Studio's Weblog 