6th Grade Art Studio: Day of the Dead

Students are working on creating tinfoil armatures with lightbulb heads. What better way to start their own skeleton sculptures. Day of the Dead is a Mexican celebration of family and ancestors. Families create shrines to those who have died and honor their memories with ceremonies and picnics on the last day of Oct. through Nov. 2nd. Throughout Mexico and the southwest America, we can find skeleton sculptures that celebrate this holiday. Skeletons range from brides and grooms to rock bands, farmers to investment bankers and dancers to drag racers. Whatever you could do in real life, these skeletons do in their own magical worlds. Students are creating poses and making gesture drawings of those action poses, then recreating those positions in sculpture form.

Values- 7th Grade Still Life Project

Value drawings show depth by showing light and shadows on an object. You can use many different marks to do this, but the three most popular ones are smudging or tonal values, crosshatching and linear values. No matter what style of art you prefer to draw in, all three use lights and darks to show that edges are round, sink in or push up and what is in front vrs. what is behind.

Using Line to Create Moods

Vertical images make us think of organized strength, like a soldier or an orderly bookshelf. Horizontal images make us feel peaceful and restful. Diagonal images create energy and action. How you choose to lay out your composition makes a difference in how others percieve it. It is important to think about what you want the viewer to come away with after experiencing your artwork.

7th Grade Drawing-Contour and Values

Students are looking at drawing with contour lines and values.
The assignment is:
1. To use the viewfinder to create an interesting composition in contour lines.
2. To create a mood for the composition by using horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines to move the eye and create a specific kind of energy in the drawing.
3. To use thick and thin lines to show shadows and value with the width and darkness of the lines
4. To use 3 shades of values in their drawings: can be linear, crosshatching or smudging.

6th grade: Making Tools and Paints

What options did cave artists have to make art? They probably started by picking up a stone or rock that looked like something else. Maybe the marks in the rock looked like a face, or the stick looked like an animal. But what if they wanted to make their own images of animals? Students looked at what they could use to make their own marks. They experimented with sticks and combs, styrofoam and feathers to make a variety of marks on paper. What made the best textures? What looked more like fur? What made the best lines?
They looked at what could be used to make paint. How would you make things stick to the walls. Students experimented with Carbohydrates and sugars (flour and corn syrup), Protiens (egg yolks and milk) and fats (lard) to see what mixture would make the best paints. Each has an advantage, and a disability when it comes to drawing. Students made their own choices on which they liked best, then learned how egg tempera and milk tempera were popular art materials for hundreds of years.

8th grade Clay

Eighth grade students are exploring slabs and texture. They have created relief sculptures (flat on one side with many layers of depth) using incised (cut into) and raised relief(images that stick out)for designs. Students are now decorating slabs with surface design, creating textures with stamps, cloth, printmaking plates and clay tools to make fascinating surfaces on the outside of their cups. They are practicing their technical skills at connecting clay with adding handles and seams.

Sixth Grade Cave Art

Do walls talk? If they did, what would they tell us? Who built them? Why? Can you imagine a world without walls? Talking walls, based on the book of the same name by Margy Burns Knight , is a project that introduces children to cave art and a variety of cultures by looking at important walls from around the world.

Sixth grade students will be looking at wall art through a variety of books and videos and discussing theories of why people think these drawings exist. Students are experimenting with making drawing tools and paints like prehistoric artists, and will be creating their own "rock" walls by covering ceiling board with plaster.
We will look at the compositions of cave artists and talk about elements of art that these ancient artists used. They will design compositions on their own walls,using specific elements and principles of art. Students will seal their walls with a varnish, so that the art wouldn't crack and fall off the plaster, as did much of the ancient work in the Lascoux caves.

Observation Drawings 7th Grade

Predicting vrs. Observing


By the time they get to middle school, kids know a lot. Their minds are constantly filling with information. In order to move to the next thing quickly, they learn to predict. What is the teacher really looking for? What is going to happen next? What is the story trying to tell us? Their minds are dealing with facts and figures and calculating what the next question will be.
But this makes learning to draw difficult. The mind, in its hurry to move on to the next lesson, tries to anticipate what you are seeing. If you look at a vase, your mind registers that it is a vase and drops in a symbol of a vase in your mind's eye. But in art, we can't work with just symbols. Sometimes we need to draw a specific vase, this one right before you. We need to rely on observational skills to get that right.

One of the lessons we try to teach students is to observe. In order to do that, they need to look carefully at details, slow down their thinking (so the symbols don't replace what they are looking at) and draw slowly. We teach them to move their hand in sync with their eye, following the outline of an image as a contour line drawing. By learning to observe, students not only become better drawers, but they learn to notice more, to see what others are doing and feeling and to be better witnesses when the need arises.

Welcome to the New Year- First Units

Sixth and Seventh grade will start the year with learning about the language of art. It is very difficult to talk about art, when you don't have the right words. By learning the elements of art (the tools you use to draw with) and the principles of art (how we put those down on the paper to get people to see what we want them to), we have a better way to talk about the art we look at and make.

Clay students are reviewing the basic vocabulary of clay, and learning to recycle clay that has dried out. Soon they will be working on their first extended project.

Art Studio 7 is begining a project on Super Hero Vegetables and Fruits. They will be creating giant paper mache sculptures to hang in the cafe.

Art Studio 6 is beginning a poster series, creating "READ" posters for the library.

Art Studio 8 is working on a classroom mural of elements and principles of art, and beginning their individualized contracted projects.