Oil Pastel Aurora Borealis

Description: The students learned about the aurora borealis and how it forms. The students made their own with oil pastel. First, you need to cut out your mountains/landscape to gauge where you will need to make your waves of light. Trace your landscape onto another black sheet of paper. Then, crack open the oil pastels and pick out the blues, greens, purples, and white. Because the paper is so dark I recommend using white to make your wavy lines first so that when you layer another color on top, it pops more. After drawing wavy lines, using medium pressure, draw on top with your blue, green, or purple. This is the messy part. With your finger or Q-tip, lightly smudge the pastel in an upwards motion. Careful not to overbend or it will become streaky like my purple in the top left corner. Feel free to put down more color to make it more vibrant. After everything is smudged, move back to your landscape. Add highlights, snow for mountains, to add some realism. Lastly, glue the landscape onto the black paper with your aurora. I also added dots to look like stars.

Extension Activity: An extension activity that would work great is teaching them about the magnetic poles of the earth, which creates this phenomenon. 
 

Crayon Resist Watercolor

Description: This was a watercolor project that the class did. We learned different techniques like washes, gradated washes, dry brush, wet on wet, and more. Then, everyone followed along to outline the picture with pencil first. First, we drew the three lines to indicate the background. Then, the pedestal. Lastly, the vase of flowers. Use a ruler to make neat, straight lines. We traced the lines with a black sharpie and a ruler. Then, using a white crayon as a wax resist, we made patterns along the walls. It is a little difficult to see in the photo and the colors are a little light too. A darker color or more saturated pigment will make the white crayon pop when painted over. Next, put flat washes of warm colors for the background and flat washes of cool colors for the pedestal and vase. Set them out to dry. Something that helps with warping paper is to tape down the paper before starting to paint. 

Extension Activity: A fun activity that you can use to extend on this is to create a 3D model of the student's dream room. Have them use found objects at home and outside. Then have them explain their room to the class.

 

Elements and Principles Scavenger Hunt

Description: The students were instructed to find each element and principle they could find around them. Looking around the classroom, school, and at home, they took photos of the elements and principles they found. They found shapes, lines, spaces, colors, values and textures. They also found thing that exhibited the principles of art: balance, unity, variety, emphasis, movement, pattern.

Extension Activity: A great extension activity to go along with this is teaching the students adjectives. After they find the element or principle, they have to write as many disruptive words as they can about the photo. The photo of the heart could be vibrant, round, or red and the photo of the layered lines could be colorful, long, or squiggly. 

 

Claude Monet Imitation

 

Description: The students learned about the impressionist painter Claude Monet and his water lily paintings. The supplies you will need are watercolor paper, watercolor paints and brushes, salt, crayons, pink, white, and green paper. For this, you will need to have prepared a few things beforehand to make it easier for the students and you. Precut the pink paper into 1 in strips, cut the green paper into Pac Man shapes, and cut the white paper into squares around 5 x 5 in. Have each student grab 1 piece of watercolor paper, 1 green Pac Man shape, 1 white square, and 1 pink strip. First thing you should have the students do is the watercolor for the background. Tape the watercolor paper to the table (this will help to keep it steady, create a nice border, and keep the paper from wrinkling too much). Before taping, stick the tape to your clothes a few times so it isn't as sticky and there will be less of a chance that it will rip the paper when you take it off. Wet the entire paper and add blotches of blue, purple, and green. When the students are done painting, and the paper is STILL WET, come around and sprinkle some salt on the paper (if you trust your students, you can let them sprinkle the salt, just make sure they don't use too much). Set it aside to dry. On the green Pac Man, draw veins and add shading with various green crayons (I added a border on mine to make it pop). Have the students draw and cut out a flower from the white square and curl the petals with a pencil. Color orange along the long edge of the pink strip. Make lots of tiny cuts along the orange edge to make a frayed look and roll it like a cinnamon roll. Have a hot glue station ready where the students bring up their pink and orange rolls so you can hot glue them to the center of their white flowers. Glue the flower to the lily. Once the watercolor is dry (might have to dry overnight) glue the lily pad to the watercolor painting with white liquid glue and set it to dry. 

Extension Activity: You can use this as a sort of science experiment with salt. The salt attracts, soaks in, the water making a small pool. Using the watercolor can help make this effect more visible.

Flower Printmaking

Description: You will need 4 square pieces of paper, water-based ink, ink rollers, parchment paper, thin foam cut into slightly smaller squares, and a pencil. First, have the students draw flowers on the square pieces of paper. Then, have them choose their 2 favorites. Tape the drawings onto the thin foam boards and trace their lines. Make sure they use enough pressure to make indents on the foam. When they are done, take the paper off and have them re-trace the lines they just made on the foam board, so they are nice and deep but not making any holes. Next, tape down the parchment paper to the table or surface. Put a few dollops of in on the parchment and, using a roller, roll it out to an even consistency. It shouldn't be too thick. You will know that it is too thick if the ink on the roller has a spiky texture, keep rolling until it is minimized or gone all together. Lastly, roll the ink onto the foam stamp evenly. Carefully place the ink covered stamp in the center of a slightly larger square paper. Ink will get everywhere on your hands, it is inevitable. Place a clean piece of paper on top of the stamp and apply even pressure. You can use a clean ink roller, but using just your hands works too. To see if you need to ally more pressure, lift a corner of the foam stamp to see the results. Do not lift the whole stamp off unless it is well covered in the ink. Peal the paper off of the stamp and let dry overnight. Do this with all of the stamps. Our class had each student make two stamps and was partnered with another student. The students would use each other's stamps collaboratively, taking turns. Once the prints have dried overnight, glue them onto a sheet of construction paper, have the students write their name on their project, and you're done!

Extension Activity: An extension activity you could do with this is instead of drawing flowers or plants from memory, have the students trace leaves and plants they scavenge from around the playground or school. This would be great for a biology class when teaching about different types of plants. 

Clay Flower

Description: Students learned about the different methods of how to use clay as an art medium. They learned about the wedging process, score and slip, coils, slabs, and how to cut out shapes. Make sure that with wedging you use canvas or a surface that absorbs a lot of water otherwise it will stick to the table. There are lots and lots of videos that you can find on YouTube for a visual demonstration of clay techniques. With this new knowledge of how to use clay, the students made flowers using a bowl to let it dry into a 3D shape as opposed to a flat one. Make sure to tap the bottom of the bowl so that the clay flower sinks to the bottom of the bowl. After they dry overnight, they students had the option to paint their flowers with acrylic paint. Note: this is NOT food safe, make sure you let students (and parents) know. 

Extension Activity: This would be a great activity to go along with teaching students about bees and pollination. Painting the flowers bright colors to attract bees just like real flowers do. You can even teach the different parts that make up a flower and their function so students can make those details as opposed to a generic flower shape.