4th and 5th grade Artists are creating wonderful towers full of value and texture! We looked at the incredible Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow Russia for inspiration. Students are concentrating on creating gray values and textures with sharpie pens. Students are really throwing caution to the wind using the permanent markers, and learning how to make mistakes look like incredible patterns or part of the original texture.
This week is Celebrate Freedom week in Austin ISD. In art class, we are looking at two American Artists and how they celebrate our country's history and freedom through their artworks.
Childe Hassam was an American of British descent, and he took personal pride in the allegiance of Britain, France and the United States during the First World War. His painting "Allied Day, May 1917" shows the American support for the U.S. entering the war. The scene in the painting depicts flags flying on Fifth Avenue in new York City, and if you look closely, you can see citizens marching in the streets in a Preparedness Parade. Hassam set up his easel on a balcony of a building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street to paint the scene.
Norman Rockwell's 1943 painting "Free Speech" depicts a man standing up to speak about the famous "Four Freedoms" speech that Franklin D. Roosevelt made in his 1941 State of the Union address: Freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom of worship. Norman Rockwell had served in the military during World War I, and as an artist he wanted to continue to serve his country after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Rockwell did a series of four paintings about Roosevelt's Four freedoms speech, and all of them were published in "The Saturday Evening Post." These paintings helped galvanize the U.S. to action during the war.
Third grade artists are reviewing line and shape for their first art project. Students first used shapes to draw the different parts of their insect: head, thorax, abdomen, antennae, and six legs. Then students started adding different lines and shapes to create patterns inside their insect shapes. Here students are creating their beautiful patterns.
Fourth and Fifth Grade students are working hard on their Graphic Designs, which will decorate the front cover of their sketchbooks. For this project, students are reviewing the art elements line and shape. Students are using shape and line in various ways: to show patterns, texture, or to show their individual interests. Throughout the year, we will be using the sketchbooks to work and write about art. Check out some of their work in progress!
Kinder students are learning about geometric shapes in art class. We concentrated on five geometric shapes: circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and ovals. We also practiced coloring inside of the geometric shapes and not leaving any peek-a-boo spots. Here are some kinder students hard at work on their geometric shapes.
Second Grade artists are reviewing lines, shapes, and patterns! Each student chose to draw a cat, a dog, or a bird. After adding details like eyes, ears, or beaks, students filled in their animals with imaginary patterns. All students put on their creative thinking caps and really tried to create some outstanding line and shape patterns. Stay tuned to see how we will add color to our animals.
First Grade artists are hard at work reviewing their lines and shapes. This day in art class, instead of drawing, we tried printing lines, and then created shapes with those lines. After practicing our lines and shapes, we printed a picture.
Thanks to last year's second grade artists, we have a nice big bulletin board full of Wild Things to welcome us back to school this year! This 2011-2012 school year is full of fun things for our Zilker panthers to explore and discover. Check out all the different textures students created on their wild things, and stay tuned for some amazing art from all grades this year!
Fourth Grade students are studying Value and Texture. We created four value scales using different shading techniques: blending, hatching, cross-hatching, and stippling. We then drew an ordinary pencil using contour line. Students had to choose a shading technique to help create the illusion of depth in their pencil drawings. Students also studied the direction of light, and added a shadow to further show three-dimensional depth in their two-dimensional drawing.
Third grade students are studying the artist Pablo Picasso and his style of art called Cubism. We looked at many of Picasso's Cubist portraits of people, and also saw how he influenced the Pop artist Andy Warhol. We then drew faces and make them have both frontal views and side views at the same time. We used lines to further "break" our drawings down into simple shapes, and here students are painting the shapes with bright colors.
