2nd grade artists study Georgia O'Keeffe

Second graders are learning all about Georgia O'Keeffe. We read the book "My Name is Georgia" by Jeanette Winter, and students took notes about Georgia's life. We looked at several of her paintings, concentrating on her flower paintings.

Students then drew a technical drawing of a flower, labeling the separate parts. Students will be drawing expressive flowers in preparation for a flower painting. We will also be studying the intermediate colors and choosing one of them for the larger petals in the final flower painting.

First Grade Color Books

First Grade students are learning all about color! Students mixed primary colors to create secondary colors and made their own color wheels.

Then students learned about the complementary colors, the colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel.

Students created paintings using the cool colors: violet, green, and blue.

Students also created warm color paintings using red, orange, and yellow.

Kinder Five Senses Book

Kinder art students are working on a whole unit about their Five Senses: Hearing, Seeing, Touching, Smelling, and Tasting. Each art day we have an experience exploring each of the five senses. Students draw about their experiences, and after we have explored all of the senses we put the drawings together to make a book. In these photos students are touching objects that are hidden inside cups and socks. This way students have to rely only on their sense of touch to identify the hidden objects. They then try to draw the objects.

Fourth Grade Artists build house sculptures

Fourth graders are working hard on their house sculptures. First we brain-stormed adjectives that could describe older houses that had been neglected or abandoned. Some adjectives students thought of were: spooky, old, worn, tired, rickety, crooked, scary, sad, creaky, suspicious, dusty, rough, cold, forgotten, mysterious, and different. Then we started constructing the bottom walls of the house. Students learned that this project uses a lot of glue! Next we added a second level, roofs, and details like windows, boards, and shutters. Because the sculpture is three-dimensional, students are trying hard to make each side of the house interesting and varied. Check out some of their work in progress!

Third Grade study the art of Laurel Burch

Third Graders are studying artist Laurel Burch. We concentrated on her beautiful paintings of cats and dogs. Each student practiced drawing different dogs or cats with imaginary patterns and human expressions. Students picked their best one to add oil pastel to. Before adding the color, students outlined their pencils lines with glue. Then students planned out their colors, making sure they had one pair of complementary colors. Complementary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. Then students added oil pastels.

2nd Grade Cityscapes

Shapes, lines, and imaginary colors...that's what second grade artists have been studying. Students drew part of Austin's downtown skyline, then choose the time of day and added a few details in the sky and on Ladybird Lake. Here you can see them adding imaginary color to their drawings with watercolors. LOVE the colors!!

Kinder students study free form shapes!

It is officially Autumn, although it still feels like summer with our triple digit temperatures. Kinder students explored free form shapes in art class and created rubbings of leaves in honor of Autumn. The next day we painted our leaves with watercolors.
Students had to learn how to use their brushes gently - they all did a great job!

2nd Grade Pattern Animals

Color! Color! Color! Second graders' animals look wonderful with the addition of watercolors.

4th & 5th Grade Russian Architecture Drawings

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.

Celebrating Freedom Week in Art Class

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.