Art Blog April 2014

Thank you to all of you who came to visit "The Bacich Box Show" on April 10. The show was a huge success! Thank you to all 1st-4th grade art docents for doing an amazing job informing our guests, and representing your grade levels. 

During the month of April the Kindergarten through 4th grade students have worked on the following art projects:

Kindergarten Flower Vase Still-Life

3rd grade Navajo Sand Paintings

Kindergarten:    Oil Pastel Flower Vase Still-Life

There are crayons... and then there are pastels! In this project, the students were introduced to the photorealist Ben Schonzeit. Students practiced flower drawing techniques. While depicting the flowers and vases on a large scale, the students also picked up basic oil pastel skills - learning how to blend by layering the intense, mixable pastel colors, shading to achieve light and dark,and using their fingers as a tool. A layered, three-dimensional effect was also achieved with the addition of hand made paper petals.

Oil pastels were created in 1920 in Japan as a means of introducing Western art education to children. While not a fine arts medium when it was first produced, it was an immediate commercial success and soon after, artists such as Picasso began using oil pastels as a recognized art medium.

please see examples of student work above

1st GRADE:               Royal Self Portrait

In connection with the first grade core Language Arts “Fairy Tale” studies, students sketched a large sized “Royal Self-Portrait”. Students were encouraged to use their imagination and visualize what it would be like if they were “King or Queen.” Students painted the large self portraits  with tempera paints. To make the “royal look” perfect, gold and silver paints were applied to the King’s and Queen’s crowns by the artists. 

2nd GRADE:          Spring Chickens

The spring chicken art project correlates with the second grade social studies “Farm Unit,” as well as with Mrs. Libby’s upbringing on a farm in Switzerland. Students learned to use geometric shapes to sketch hens, roosters and little chicks. Students had a choice to enlarge a hen or a rooster onto a 9”x12” paper. In order to create a “feather like texture”, students used white paint and different colored tissue paper to turn their drawings into a barnyard regular.

3rd GRADE:     Navajo Sand Painting

In connection with the 3rd grade social studies curriculum, third grade students studied the unique Native American art for of the Navajo tribe. Sand painting is the art of pouring colored sands, powdered pigments from minerals or crystals onto a surface to make a fixed, or unfixed sand painting. Unfixed sand paintings have a long established cultural history in numerous social groupings around the globe, and are often temporary, ritual paintings prepared for healing ceremonies.

Students worked with traditional Navajo icons and symbols to created a fixed sand painting on a sand paper surface. Students took great care in painting the Native American images honoring the Navajo color palette. 

please see examples of student work above

4th GRADE:     California Watercolor Books

This lesson connects with the 4th grade studies on California. The 4th grade students were introduced to four different watercolor techniques. Students experimented with the wet-in-wet, glazing, dry brush, and printing with cardboard techniques. Students created an accordion fold book out of watercolor paper and practiced each technique on one page of the book. Students worked with simple bookbinding techniques to create a frond and back cover for their books. On the back side of the accordion book, students painted a California landscape representing one of the four California regions (coast, mountains,desert, central valley). Students applied the watercolor techniques to the landscape. As a finishing touch students wrote a thoughtful quote in their book. The quote informs the viewer about an idea, emotion, or connection to the landscape that cannot be seen.