New Year, New Things Happening in the Art Room

Welcome to the 2014-2015 school year! I am so excited to be back for another great year at St. Roberts! There are a few changes in the art room this year so I just wanted to briefly touch on them.

GRADING! Grades 4-8 will have a slightly different grading process this year. Instead of ONLY being graded on behavior, students will also be graded on each art project. BE NOT AFRAID. Grades will be based on a list of requirements, not based on talent. As long as students follow directions and complete their project on time, they will do fine.

FIRST FIVE. Students in grades 2-4 will be participating in an opening activity each day called First Five. When they come into the art room, there will be an activity on the smart board for students to quietly complete. It could be anything from writing down thoughts on a piece of artwork to a quick drawing of something. Before moving on to our lesson or project work time, we will discuss the first five as a class.

ARTSONIA. Artsonia.com is a website where students from all over the world create online art galleries. Last year, my third grade students (now fourth grade), used artsonia to upload four or five pieces of artwork.Their families could go online and see their artwork and even had the chance to purchase merchandise that featured their student's artwork. This year, ALL students K-8 have been designated an artsonia account. Every project completed in class will be uploaded to artsonia. Keep an eye out!

BLOG. I will still update the blog as regularly as possible, but I will not be uploading images of student artwork. Because we have artsonia, I will direct your attention to student artwork often via that site.

And last but DEFINITELY not least,

IPADS!! The art room has been given 8 iPads from Home and School. We will be using the iPads for art history and artist research, group projects, art app exploration, and artsonia uploads. I am so excited to be able to use these with all grade levels!

Fifth Grade Printmaking

The fifth graders have been (and still are) working on a printmaking project. The students began by choosing and animal and drawing it onto a regular piece of white paper. They took a foam printmaking plate and traced their animal outline onto the foam using a pencil. Now came the first fun part, they used a brayer to roll acrylic paint onto their foam plate and print their image on to three different pieces of paper. After that, they revisited their drawing and added all the detail to the printmaking plate. They cut out their animal and printed it on all three papers in the opposite color. They are turning out quite nicely. 5B still has a lot of work to do but many of the students from 5A are done. Here are some of the great projects from 5A that are finished.

Fifth Grade Bulletin Board

Fifth grade did a great job on their "Jim Dine Hearts". We learned about the popular artist Jim Dine who used hearts in his artwork. Students were inspired by this idea and used color and pattern to create unity in their artwork. These pieces are up on a bulletin board in the art room and they look fantastic!

Jim Dine Hearts

Fifth grade has been learning about an artist named Jim Dine, who was inspired by cubism. He used the common "heart" in many of his paintings. Students learned about two of the principles of design, pattern and unity. They have been using oil pastels to create unity in the separate pieces of their heart. Here are some great examples from 5B:

      Peter

      Isaac

       Josh

Art Room Update 10/10

There won't be many pictures this week because almost every class is in the middle of a project. Here is what students have been working on this week:

Kindergarten just started doing self portraits. They will finish these next week and also do a drawing of their whole body.

First Grade finished their scarecrows and are starting their self-portraits today.

Second Grade started self-portraits. They should be able to finish them next week.

Third Grade started a collage project. I am really excited to see these when they are finished. They will be our next artsonia upload.

Fourth Grade is finishing up their contour resist projects and will finish a silhouette project this week or next.

Fifth grade didn't have art this week, so they will be finishing up their Jim Dine heart project next week. These should turn out to look  very good.

Sixth grade has one more class period to work on their cityscape, then we are starting a new project.

Seventh is finishing up their "yellow line" project.

Eighth grade is finishing up their typography letter contrast assignment. I think these are going to end up looking really cool as well.

Fifth Grade

Fifth Grade is in the same boat as fourth. We are trying to catch up on about three different projects. We did a very cool texture project with some buildings using sharpie and a background of oil pastel. And we also looked at the illustrations of Alex Eben Meyer who lives and works in Brooklyn. He uses the tentacles of octopi in illustrations to create some pretty cool things. There is an example above. We tried to use this to write our names, and a lot of them turned out pretty cool. Here are some examples of what we have been working on in fifth grade.

5A

    Jimmy

     Rain

     Rocco

     Molly 

     Aidan F. 

     Will

      Noah

     Macy

5B

    Nolan

     Elizabeth

    Thomas

    Kyle

      Peter

      Daniel

     Isaac

      Mary

Fifth Grade Texture Names

Fifth grade worked for a couple weeks on these projects. While they took a little longer then I had hoped, so many of them turned out really great!! Students learned about how to make visual texture using patterns. They were asked to put their name in bubble letters in a grid, and put a different texture in each section. When done correctly, the names appear hidden, but not completely. See if you can see the names in these projects. 

5A

    Mary 

     Lindsey

     Trip

      Kaitlyn

     Claire

      Juliana

5B

     Dan

    Nolan

    Tana

    Karmen

    Grace

    Max