Winter Projects

Winter projects bring lots of excitement, chaos, and mess to the art room, but students have so much fun creating with new materials. Kindergarteners created snowmen from circular sponge stamps and white tempera paint on 4"x4" blue paper. Then, they built houses for their snowmen to live from popsicle sticks, wood glue and a splash of color using tempera paint. 

We also experimented with mini winter landscapes by tearing small 5"x6" drawing paper into three strips to create our foreground, middle ground, and background. One edge of each torn strip was traced with blue or purple chalk pastels, and then, smeared to give it a hazy look. Students overlapped the torn strips to create the illusion of hills and glued the strips in place to blue construction paper.

Second and first graders learned special tricks used by artists to create the illusion of space in their own winter landscapes such as overlapping, changing the size of objects (smaller objects in background, larger objects in foreground) as well as the placement of objects on the paper (Lower objects in foreground, higher objects in background), and changing the value of objects so it appears lighter and hazier as it recedes into the background.

Second graders used double loaded and dry brush techniques to create their trees, while first graders cut their trees for their winter landscapes from green construction paper.

Recycled Snowmen are a tradition in second grade as a winter project. It gives second grade students the opportunity to use glue guns safely and choose materials that would be most appropriate to use with glue guns or craft glue such as buttons, pom pom, fleece, sequins, scrap paper, etc.

Recyced snowman ornaments and final touches on Winter Landscapes

2nd grade students started their snowman ornament made from recycled jar and can lids. Now, these cans weren't opened with just any can opener, but a special pampered chef can opener that leaves the edges safe to touch. Students sanded the lids and painted white with tempera paint. I thought sanding would be enough to rough the surface to make the paint stick, but we still had flaking paint so I added a layer of white spray paint for coverage. A hammer and Phillips head screw driver work great for adding holes to the lids to connect with silver or white pipe cleaners. 2nd graders will be adding collage items with craft glue and hot glue to complete their snowman.

Kindergarteners are spending their last week on winter landscapes adding glitter, sequins and other details with construction paper crayons.

Winter Landscapes Continued...

Parents, watch your email for the recent art upload to your child's Artsonia account in the next week. First and second graders are close to finishing their winter landscapes and I am starting to upload images to Artsonia, our online art gallery.  Last touches the students are adding to their paintings; snow falling, wind strokes with curved lines, and snow resting on the branches of their trees and mountains. A new trick that students learned today is using the brush end (handle side) to paint the snowflakes. This very much surprised the students because they never thought we could dirty the handles, but this technique makes really simple small dots, perfect size for a winter snowflake.

Adding Trees to our Winter Landscapes

After reviewing the little tricks artists use to create the "illusion of space", students in first and second grades started painting their trees on their snowy landscapes. Many of the tricks these students were using included changing the size of the trees, the trees became smaller as it receded in space. Students also changed the value of their trees. As the trees reached the middle ground and background, the trees become lighter in value. The third trick that we discussed was that as the trees receded in space, the trees became higher on our paper.  This painting required a lot of thought as students needed to consider those three items (value, size, and placement) as they painted their trees in the winter landscape.

Kindergarteners, instead of painting their trees, are cutting their trees from three different sizes of construction paper; small, medium, and large. The trees will be decorated with crayons and glued in the appropriate area of space within their winter landscapes; large trees in the foreground, medium trees in the middle ground, and small trees in the background (5 trees total). Using the rectangle paper, students made a dot at the top of their rectangle in the center of the paper, draw two straight lines down from the dot in the center to the corners at the bottom.  After cutting on the lines to make their triangle, each child made sure their names were on the back so as not to get their trees mixed up with someone else's at their table section. The trees are stored in their table section's drawer and will be decorated next time with construction paper crayons.

 

 

As we are working on our landscapes, we constantly refer back to Grant Wood's and Pieter Bruegel's landscapes to see how these artists, even though centuries apart, are still using similar techniques to create the "illusion of space" (objects up close and far away).

Winter Landscapes

With the threat of snow looming next week, students are preparing papers for a winter landscape. Just this week, we have been focusing on little tricks that artists use to create the illusion of space, atmospheric perspective being one example.  After examining Pieter Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" landscape and Grant Wood's "Stone City, Iowa" landscape for depth, students were inspired to create their own landscapes.

Once we reviewed how objects in the foreground are darker and larger than objects in the background, 2nd graders were given three plates, white and blue paint and asked to create three values for their snowy winter landscape making a foreground, middle ground, and background.

Next week, students will be adding trees and other details to complete their winter landscapes.