Artistic Freedom

The Book My second graders learned about Eric Carle.  We looked at the book "The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse." The book was a easy read, but does a great job of using warm and cool colors in contrasting fashion with each page. Most of the pictures have a warm colored animal and a cool colored ground or vis-versa. For the lesson we looked at two pages, the cover page with the horse and another page with an orange elephant. The students started out by coloring a 12x18 piece of paper with either warm colors or cool colors. Warm colors if they were doing the elephant, and cool colors if they were making the horse. The next class the students that used cool colored crayons used cool colored paint. The students painted over the entire paper and then used various scraping tools to at scratch and texture marks. The students love Eric Carle because of this scratching technique. The next class, I made multiple tracers for each animal......

A little break from my classroom... My girlfriend's grandfather makes these hand-made santa's every year for all the grandchildren. They look great, but as an artist and one that grew up with a carpenter father, I appreciate the time and tedious detail added to each one of these. The Santa with the lantern has over 20 different pieces. Each piece has to be cut, sanded, glued, and painted or stained. I love my girlfriend very much, but I must admit now that we have a house I love her even more because I am able to put these amazing works of art in my house over the holidays. Bill, your work is amazing and much appreciated!

My fifth graders just finished weaving... yay!!!! It surprised me last year and still this year how much kids love to weave. We start out with the making of our cardboard looms with 1/2 inch spacing for the warp strings. The students string the warp strings and then start weaving UNDER OVER UNDER OVER. They all calm down and really concentrate on what they are doing. I have heard of teachers putting in educational movies or biographies of an artist to entertain students (Might try that next year). Either way, my fifth graders loved weaving and loved making the weaving into a pouch to hold their electronic divides. I let the students choose how wide they wanted their pouch to be before starting. The  narrow 9 warp strings wide (4-5 inches) would hold things like an ipod or cell phone. The 12-14 warp string wide (6-7 inches) could hold a reading tablet or ipad mini. Once I told then that they were making something they could use I had then hooked. The lesson ...

This is my attempt to introduce my third grade students to "window drawing" and "still-lifes." I gave each student their own indian chunk of corn to draw, as well as a 2x2 inch window opening cardboard square. The students started out by taping the window to an interesting part of the corn and started drawing what they saw (enlarging...so hard, but great practice) on a 12x12 inch piece of paper. With little direction, I had the students start drawing right after they taped the window on the corn. I figured the students would draw the image at lease four times smaller than they should... didn't expect them to draw it smaller than real life size on the corn haha. After a while I stopped the students and had them walk around and look at one another's drawings. I followed this up with a demonstration showing them how to break the corn into sections / rows and fill those rows with irregular oval shapes (not everyone is the same size or shape). W...