Ish Art

One of the first art projects of this school year began with the reading of Ish by Peter H Reynolds.  Amazon writes that"A creative spirit learns that thinking "ish-ly" is far more wonderful than "getting it right" in this book. " 

My students were delighted with this concept and we find the suffix "ish" creeping into almost every subject area now.  

We created "ish" paintings by crumpling up 4" x 5" rectangles into balls and dabbing liquid water colours all over it.  We flattened them out and recrumpled them, then repeated this with two other colours.  We discovered some interesting ishly shapes and colour combination, some were sping-ish, others Christmas-ish and a whole bunch of other ish ones!

Grandparents Day Cards

During the next art class, my grades 6 - 8 class transformed their paintings into "ish" Grandparents Day cards.  I know that at least one gradma was "ishfully" pleased with the cards she received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support Staff Appreciation Cards

My grades 1 & 2 students designed thank you cards to present to our EA for all he hard work at our Support Staff Appreciation party.









 

  Christmas Cards

 Finally, just before Christmas, my grades 3 - 5 class turned their ish paintings into Christmas cards for parents, grandparents and other family members and friends.

I'm sure all who received these cards were absolutely, ishfully delighted with them.

Nativity Silhouettes

Painting can be messy, but oh, sooo fun!  In this project, students were introduced to value.  I followed Sandra's Savvy Teaching Tips to create the backgrounds.   That Artist Woman uses a similar procedure, so, I've added both links. 
For the silhouettes, I simply googled "nativity silhouettes" to find the images pictured below.  Ideally, the images are to be traced on black construction paper and then cut out; however, since I did this with younger students, I chose to simplify it by merely having them cut out the printed images.
As you can see, we used two different tones of blue for our projects.  I'm not sure which I like best, the warm or cool blue.  What do you say?

Leaf Relief

 One of my fall art projects came from Fall Leaves.
We basically followed Cassie's instructions, except that we created leaf rubbings (using wax crayons and a black paint wash)  for the background rather than the ideas that she suggested.


What intrigued me most about the project is the "metallic" leaf created out of cardboard, leaves, tinfoil and spray paint.  In the end they really looked as if they were tarnished metal.





If I were to do it again, I would perhaps have each student create several "metal" leaves for their background.



 
As you'll notice, some of the backgrounds are more grey than black - I made them with different classes and added more water to the black paint.

Plaster Leaves and Fall Fans

Plaster Leaves

For some art classes it works best to work on two projects simultaneously.  I began by getting the students started on leaf rubbings.  Then I took groups of 3 or 4 students and had them do plaster leaves which I found on "That Artist Woman's" blog you can find her detailed instructions at Plaster Leaf Prints.

Once the first group had theirs done, they went back to their leaf rubbings and the next group came to do their plaster leaves.  That Artist Woman explains, it's best to apply a coat of Mod Podge to the plaster before painting the leaves to prevent the acrylic paint from being totally absorbed by the plaster.

 

Fall Fans

During the second class, we first painted the plaster leaf imprints with acrylic paints.  As they dried, we switched to our leaf rubbings.  They started by drawing lines about 2 centimeters apart (we have rulers that are about that width) across the back of their leaf rubbing sheets.  The score lines helped make even accordion folds. Finally we folded our leaf rubbings into some fine fall fans!

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

There are selfies, and then there are selfies.  These ones require the students to know what their back view looks like.  I won't go into great detail as to how to create them as it is well described here at Self Portraits.

I do want to mention that when I did this with my students, we spent a class just practicing.  We had different students be our models (one girl and one boy).  I asked the students to observe the pleats in the girl's Mitz (bonnet), then the girls practiced drawing one.  Similarly, the boys checked out the suspenders.  These two items of clothing are of course what gave our portaits their Hutterite flavour.  They all added background.  I had the older students do a bit more on perspective than the younger ones did.

The most challenging part I found was drawing the hand holding the mirror.  Ironically it turned out to be easiest for the students in grades 1 and 2.  Since their portraits are about the same size as they are in real life, I simply had them hold their pencil as if they were holding a mirror handle and then traced around it.  They added th details such as fingers and knuckles.

Winter Wonders

During the cold, sometimes blustery month of January, my primary and intermediate art classes created projects to coincide with the weather.  Now our hall walls give one a chilly feeling.

 Winter Trees

My grades 4 - 7 class created winter trees.  We first read about Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp and looked at an example of his painting as pictured in The Usborne ART Treasury by Rosie Dickins.  Then we created our own versions.   It took a couple of classes as we did the landscape one day and had to leave it to dry.  During the next art class we painted the trees using watery black paint.  We dropped globs of paint on our paper where we wanted our tree trunks to be and blew through a straw, first upwards to create a trunk, then diagonally to create branches, shrubs and bushes.  We didn't always have control of the direction the branches went, so we had some surprises.

 

The Best Snowman Ever

My grades 1 - 3 art project was inspired by Kathy Waldner's blog (not sure what her blog spot is).  We read The Best Snowman Ever by Margery Cuyler, then proceeded to draw our own snow people with oil pastels on blue construction paper.  The girls' people turned into queens, princesses and the like, while the boys stayed more traditional, with the exception of one snow-soldier.  All of them seem rather happy.

 

Mosaic Snowflakes

This art class started with a discussion of warm and cool colours and how they make is feel.  I used the book 50 Christmas things to Make and Do by Minna Lacey and Rebecca Gilpin, another Usborne book.  Contrary to it's title, this book has almost as many wintery ptojects in it as it does Christmassy ones.  Beforehand I cut shades of blues and purples into various sizes triangles.  Students were given 12 x 18  pieces of white art paper and the triangles, were instructed to designed snowflakes.  The results are quite "cool" to say the least.

Self Portraits

As part of my MI lessons we created self portraits in art class.  They took three class to complete, but I'm rather pleased with the results and the artists are very proud too!  There are actually some resemblances!  Since I know who made each portrait, my observations don't count.  However, when different community members commented on this I knew the likenesses were quite apparent.
Grades 1 & 3 students wrote about their MIs and students grade 4 and up also compiled a list of self-describing adjectives.

The self portrait and grades 1 - 3 write up ideas are from Pinterest http://gwhizteacher.blogspot.ca/2012/09/multiple-intelligences-celebration.html