Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Kindergarten Self-Portraits


SOOOOO much learning went into these self-portraits.  Kinders have been learning about texture, color mixing, collage, and drawing from observation.  Here's how we did it:
Day one we read this book about all the beautiful, different colors of us:

We talked about how everyone is the same but different and we learned how to mix a color for us using brown, white, yellow, and pink.  We painted an entire page our color.
Day two we talked about texture and mixed two colors to make a new color for our background. We used texture combs to draw lines in our wet paint and give our backgrounds texture.
Day three we practiced looking VERY CLOSELY at our faces with a mirror. We cut out an oval and drew our features with an oil pastel, paying close attention to our eyes.  We learned that there are three parts to our eyes, the white part, the iris (colored part), and a black pupil.
Day four we cut out a neck and ears from the rest of our skin color paper and assembled our portrait on our background. We cut out a shirt from construction paper.  At this point we looked very funny because we were all BALD!
Day five we used markers to add in some details to our shirts and then we broke out the paints again. We used brown, yellow, black, white, and red to mix a color for our hair. We talked about how everyone's hair color is unique, just like our skin.  We also practiced different types of lines for different types of hair, curly, straight, spiky, etc.

Whew, there you have it! I love how expressive each and every one of these are.





Thursday, April 7, 2016

Magritte Eyes

Third graders learned about Magritte and surrealism.  We read these books to learn a bit about them:

The book 'If', by Sarah Perry, is a great one to introduce the concept of surrealism to kids.  Each page poses one surrealistic idea like,  'If fish were leaves'  and is accompanied by incredible illustrations. I had the kiddos write their own 'if's' and illustrate them as an intro.  Next we looked at many paintings by Magritte and Dali.  We read 'Dinner at Magritte's' and the Mike Venezia biography of Magritte.
Here are some of the paintings and sculptures we looked at:


Using Magritte's painting, 'The False Mirror' as inspiration we chose a piece of patterned paper to make the iris of our own surreal eyes. Using mirrors we drew our own eyes and we practiced shading with oil pastels.  Our eyes:

(and then there was this awesome one:)