Yeah. me too. Well, here's all the stuff we've been doing!
Printmaking! O so fun. We made imprints into Styrofoam, laid on the ink, and printed things in our "visual culture." Mine is toothpaste! I made three other prints on different colored paper.
Vincent Van Gogh was a little bit crazy, but he was also a genius! We used oil pastels to paint a scene we saw outside our windows in a Van Gogh like manner, then painted over it with black paint. This was great to experiment with watercolor and oil resist and learn about Van Gogh.
By far my favorite assignment. Okay, so I'm a little biased towards water color. :) We got to taste different things, then tried to paint what we tasted with different water color techniques. It was a little tough to not use the color schemes of the food- to detach yourself from what you know it looks like and just paint a representation of the taste, but it was a lot of fun.
Google sketchup is magical. That's all you really need to know. We learned about different parts of Greek architecture then made buildings in this program I can't believe I didn't know existed until now. So, I probably should have done a more modern looking building with a purpose in mind, but I thought this looked cool! See the relief in the pediment? If you guessed those were the faces of Mount Rushmore, then, ding ding ding! you're right.
We colored thick with crayons on medium weight paper, then covered it with tempera and a drop of dish soap. After it was dry, we scratched in this continuous line alphabet and filled in the negative spaces with texture.
Coil Pots!
S0- after this we did some pots out of real clay that we got to glaze and and fire and all that jazz, but I wasn't able to make it up! But pinch pots and coil pots are elementary art staples. I still have a pinch pot that I made in third grade and a coil pot I made in high school. Fun stuff.
I think pots are a great to incorporate with social studies- they've been made throughout time and across cultures. Though I didn't get the full experience (I didn't get to use my awesome yarn stamps!), I would definitely teach this in a classroom.
Here's my pretty portfolio cover. :) The assignment was to cut out the block letters of your name and glue on the negative space on one side and the positive on the other. I stretched the assignment a little. cool huh?
So this one time, we drew a map of our neighborhood. Then we took a field trip and looked at maps in the Library and looked at the art gallery and talked about maps and glued the map we made on the back of another map and colored in on the map where Logan is and looked at more stuff in the gallery... It was a really long field trip. Then we were supposed to fold the map and cut the map and, well, quite frankly, I'm not really sure what we were supposed to do with the map. So I made mine into a book. This is that book.
This is an authentic African mask! ... ok, so really it's a milk carton with tape, shoe polish, paint, and raffia. But it's pretty cool lookin! If you'd like to know more about African masks, please reference the blog entry entitled "research on African masks." Or google it.
Well, that's all folks! ...for now
