Skip to main content

Painted and Printed Pumpkins


This is a video I made to teach my elementary students how to make a painting of a pumpkin. What I love about this demo is painting a pumpkin helps to show kids how to blend colors and use value to make something look round but it also shows kids how repeating curved lines will create the illusion that they are wrapped around a curved form. This helps lay a little bit of a foundation to be used later when teaching linear perspective and for Op Art. For the background, I have students print using found objects as stamps. This can help to create a nice Pop Art type of feel particularly when kids add facial features. I encourage them to use cut shapes to create emoji type faces so they are practicing their cutting and gluing skills as well as making the composition a little more more expressive and unique. I did this with young students and it worked well to break up the activities. First, they painted just a circle focusing on creating a gradient. Next, they set that aside and printed the background (I used a small paper in the video because it fit the frame better but I recommend a larger paper for the background and if you look closely at my finished piece, you can see I glued more than one small paper together so my background would be visible behind my pumpkin). After printing the background, students go back to add details to the pumpkin (that way their painting is a little dry. I found that when they add details while it is wet, the lines get blurry because the pigment spreads through the water and kids get really frustrated, over correct and ruin their work in the process). I found this to be basically a 2-3 class period project. Day 1 I try to have them paint a circle and paint background. Day 2 they cut out a pumpkin shape, add details and glue it onto their background (some kids need to finish printing the backgrounds on day 2). Day 3 I give students time to personalize it adding facial features, framing their work. I also had a great experience having kids do a little gallery walk at the end of this project. I had them focus on looking for friends who made a unique and unexpected choice in their projects then they held up strong examples and gave feedback to their peers. the kids were super sweet in complimenting each other's projects, but they also gave good, clear and concrete feedback.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Using Google Slides to Gamify Art

This is a video I made demonstrating how I use the Google Slides app to gasify my classroom. This is a sort of modified TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behaviors) setup. Most of the video demonstrates some of the things I have learned through trial and error as far as what makes for a good design, how to handle digital badges etc. One of the primary benefits of using this system, is students choose their challenges, and they are rewarded with digital badges as a recognition of their accomplishments. The whole system focuses on advancement and celebration of achievement fostering a more positive atmosphere in the classroom. Also, when students choose what they are doing, they are more engaged, and they are excited to share their work with peers. I prefer not to have stations for different media, but rather stations where students gather materials. Having all different media out on each table as students work makes for a bit more mess, but a lot more collaboration and students sparking each...

New Year, New Projects

As always, I'm trying to find some new and different projects to try out. This year, I thought I would do something inspired by Ton Schulten the Dutch painter best known for his bright colorful landscapes. I decided that I didn't want to strictly copy his work, so I encouraged my students to experiment a bit and be looser with their paint. While his work is very geometric, I encouraged my students to focus on just making a nice color field painting to start and not worry about having straight edges. This allowed students to feel more free to experiment mixing colors giving their paintings a wider range of colors and more depth to the color. After letting their paintings dry, students went over the top of those color field paintings sketching first in pencil then outlining with marker or paint. So far the results are looking great and the kids are having fun. I have been doing this project with my first graders as a nice way to start the school year introducing concepts of abs...

Post Impressionist Painting

I'm working with my second grade students to create Post-Impressionist landscape masterpieces. One thing that I find helpful is starting by looking at some work by artists like Monet, then working through some Post Impressionists like van Gogh and finally I like to end with Matisse. As we compare and contrast, by the time we get to Matisse, kids are noticing how Post-Impressionists tend to have wilder color that is less realistic than the Impressionists. Once, kids make this discovery by themselves, I like to pose the question of why artists would choose to paint with such wild colors. The natural response from a number of kids tends to be something like "to be creative" or "to make it pretty."While these answers have some truth to them, I then like to expand on kids knowledge base. One of the things I think is under appreciated about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism is the role of technology in influencing their work. The camera came about in the mid to l...