Happy New Year!
In Drawing Lab, students have been learning about the elements of art and principles of design. Before vacation, they learned about emphasis. Artists use emphasis to draw your attention to one particular part over others. Emphasis can be shown through size, color, placement, detail, and shape.
Using only dots, students were challenged to emphasize one dot by using size, color, and placement. Can you tell which one they were targeting?
The 3rd-5th graders have finished their logo designs, creating brands for themselves! Choosing their most successful sketch, students created 4 finished versions of it, with subtle changes. These logos feature the students’ initials, and are meant to be simple, one piece, and understandable.
Next up, the students tackle a Morse School logo!
Grades 3-5 are still taking Drawing Lab this year, a second art class per week! Last year, we focused on observational drawing skills, and this year the focus is more on design and elements and principles of design.
The students have been challenged to create a logo for themselves, using only their initials as their design. (Imagine the logos for Yahoo, MTV, PlayStation, and Toyota as inspiration). Their 3 goals for the sketches are compact, simple, and understandable. In the coming weeks, students will narrow down their sketches to more official logos, and may even design a Morse logo!
Here are their initial sketches and ideas:
It’s been a week of breakfast celebrations for the 3rd-5th graders. To help their parents and teachers, the students created informative posters of key terms. The posters needed to include a definition, a picture illustrating the definition, and a third component providing additional information about the term.
The Super Still Life Improvement Awards have been made, and they’re patiently waiting for next week. Next week, the 3rd-5th graders are coming to the Art Studio for a breakfast celebration where they’ll be sharing their year-long work in Drawing Lab. After observing the students, taking notes, and assessing their work, I’ve selected 3 students from each class to earn these awards. I’ll be presenting them at the breakfasts.
A reminder about the breakfasts:
3rd Grade: Wednesday, June 12th
4th Grade: Thursday, June 13th
5th Grade: Friday, June 14th
All breakfasts are 8:15-9am, in the Art Studio! Please bring breakfast snacks to share.
Drawing Lab is coming to a close. Back in September, 3rd-5th graders drew still lifes. We’ve been saving those drawings all year, learning drawing skills and techniques along the way. Currently, students are re-drawing the same still life. With new knowledge of 3d volumes, shading techniques, shadows, negative space, color blending, etc., all students can expect to see improvement. From a 4th grade class, I’ve picked 3 drawings that show the most improvement. Expect to see more soon!
Instead of pie, we made cakes! In Drawing Lab, 3rd-5th graders needed a bonus project to work on in case they finished their current project early. I decided to take a Wayne Thiebaud painting and crop it into various pieces. Students could work on enlarging the squares as they finished their work. This fit in nicely with the cubism unit we just finished. With each square worked on by many different students, the pieces didn’t really fit together perfectly. But it did turn out to be a perfect cubist version of Thiebaud’s painting!
The original:
And, the collaborative cubist version by the 3rd-5th graders:
One of the many reasons I am sad to not teach middle school anymore is the loss of teaching some of my favorite projects. One favorite project that I typically did with 8th graders was a Cubism unit focusing on the art of Picasso and David Hockney. With the opportunity of Drawing Lab for 3rd-5th graders this year, I am thrilled that I can modify that unit for the younger students! This week, students were given cut up sections of familiar objects, and had to puzzle the pieces together. With careful overlapping and matching, the student created cubist versions of the objects. This was a warm up day to the idea of Cubism; next week students will begin drawing cubist cereal boxes. Stay tuned!
In Drawing Lab, 3rd-5th graders had a choice day. They were offered 3 techniques, which they’ve recently learned: colored pencil blending, pencil shading, and eraser rendering. With a half face of a celebrity, students had to finish the other half, showing the correct values and matching the black and white photo. The drawing aspect was not part of the assignment, so a light sketch of the blank half was provided, allowing the students to focus entirely on the shading of the skin, facial features, and hair.
Here are some examples from the week: Aly Raisman, President Obama, Harry Stiles, and Taylor Swift. Also in the mix were Tom Brady, Kevin Garnet, and Bren Bataclan!
In Drawing Lab, the 3rd-5th graders got to experiment with 2 new art materials last week- vine charcoal and kneaded erasers. In general, I think the kids were excited to use such “real” art materials. They observed and drew popcorn, a perfect subject for students just learning how to create eraser renderings. They had a choice to work from a black and white photo or from real popcorn kernels….some kids enjoyed the extra challenge of the real popcorn. The general technique of eraser rendering is covering the paper with vine charcoal, and then twisting the eraser into a point to draw the object. Using a blunt side of the eraser, the light values are erased from the image.
Here are some 4th graders at work:
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