September Art Blog 2017

Welcome to the Bacich Art For Bears Program TK-4th grade!

We are off to a fabulous start.  During our first art lessons of the new school year, we established routines and rules and each one of our 645 students got to decorate their very own art journals. Each grade level had the opportunity to explore a grade-level appropriate art technique or activity.

The Art Journal

Through out the school year students will have the opportunity to use their Art Journals  in a combination of sketching, note taking, and personal journal writing. Students reflect upon and evaluate their own learning. This allows students to place reading and writing in a context that is functional and personally relevant. 

One of the key lessons in our art program is that there are no mistakes in art. Besides being a means of recording, the journal is a safe place for the student to express his or her thoughts and ideas in writing and drawing that is not corrected by the teacher, giving freedom for individual expression.

TK and Kindergarten Art Journal activity:

TK: Exploring Markers

Kindergarten: White Crayon Magic: (Crayon resists marker)

1st grade: Celebrating Dots and Circles (Crayon resits watercolor marker)

2nd: Celebrating International Dot Day, Make your mark and see where it takes you! (Fine tip black pen and color markers)

3rd and 4th GRADE Art Journal making and Cover Prints  

The art of upcycling is to reuse (discarded objects or materials) in such a way as to create a product of a higher quality or value than the original.  Third and Fourth grade students upcycled brown paper bags to create art journals. Students were introduced to the basics of bookbinding, the process of physically assembling a book from an ordered stack of recycled paper sheets folded together into sections. Students learned how to sew their journals with the saddle stitch book binding method. To personalize their journals, students decorated front and back cover with washi tape (a high quality masking tape made of rice paper). 

To embellish the front cover of their art journals even more, 3rd students used a simple Gelli Monoprinting technique. The beautiful textures and imprints of objects onto the brown paper bag journal covers look very elegant and authentic at the same time.  

4th grade students experimented with Cyanotype prints for the cover of their art journals. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used this process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost wat to produce copies of drawings, referred to a blueprints. The process uses two chemicals mixed 1:1, applied to a receptive surface (such as paper or cloth) and allowed to dry in a dark space (protected from UV light). 

Students selected art tools and objects to plan a composition for their prints.  Students placed their composition of objects onto their cyanotype papers and exposed them to sunlight. The science integration of this project was for students to experiment with light angle, cast-shadows, and the length of exposure to UV light.  After about 10-15 minutes of exposure, students put their prints in a water bath. The water-soluble iron salts were washed away, while the non-water-soluble Purssian blue remained on the paper. 

Students adhered their cyanotypes to the cover of their hand-made art journals.