March 2017
Greetings from the art room!
Here are some art highlights from the month of February.
Best,
Mr. A.
Kindergarten and
Mrs. Wynne and Ms. Nardello’s students:
We had a blast learning about the
sculptures of British artist, Anish Kapoor
(b.1954). If you have ever visited Chicago,
you may be familiar with his sculpture “Cloud
Gate” featured in the photo to the right. We
then learned how to sculpt the following 3D
forms in modeling clay: sphere, cube,
cylinder, and cone. Look around your house.
Can you find things that are spheres, cubes,
cylinders, and cones?
1st Grade: Texture was the focus for us in first grade.
We learned about the two types of texture: actual
texture and simulated texture. Actual texture is how
something actually feels. For example, the top of the
art room tables are smooth. Simulated texture is
when something looks like a texture but doesn’t feel
like the texture. For example, the art room tables
look like they are wood on top, but they are not.
There are covered in a material that looks like wood
but actually are not wood. To apply our learning, we
created crayon rubbings of actual textures and then
collaged our rubbings into an abstract work of art.
2nd Grade: In second grade, we finished our
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) inspired
lighthouse paintings. Although Mr. Hopper
created mostly in oil paint, he first found
fame as an artist with his watercolors. Just
like Mr. Hopper, we used watercolors to
brighten up our pictures!
3rd Grade: Third graders finished up their snow
scenes inspired by the works of Grandma Moses
(1860-1961). To bring our pieces to life, we added
accents with colored pencil. One of the things we
learned about is how to create the illusion of space in
a drawing. To do that, we used vertical placement
(the higher something is in a picture, the further it is
away it looks), size (as things get further away, they
appear to get smaller) and detail (as things get
further way, they appear to have less detail).
Grandma Moses also used these same techniques to
create the illusion of space in her paintings.
4th Grade: Creating the illusion of 3D space
on a 2D surface was our goal in fourth grade.
We added to what we learned in third grade
with the addition of one point perspective
drawing. We looked at examples from many
artists including: Leonardo da Vinci, Edward
Hopper and Grant and Grant Wood. A long
time ago, artists and scientists figured out
that all parallel lines appear to converge at a
single point called a vanishing point. That
vanishing point is located on the horizon line.
With that knowledge, artists were then able
to create more realistic-looking artworks. Our
fourth grade artists learned how to use one
point perspective to create their own
drawings of houses!
5th Grade: If one point perspective is cool (see the
fourth grade section above), then two point
perspective is the coolest! Artists in fifth grade
learned how to use a second vanishing point to draw
rectangular forms from a corner viewpoint. We really
challenged ourselves with this one but as you can
see, the results are quite epic!