Radial Balance in Neutral Tones

This is an art lesson I did a while back with 5th grade.  It is a  wonderful way to integrate art and math in a lesson.  Radial balance is a circular balance moving out from a central axis to maintain balance.  We first divided the circular space down into smaller portions.  They could either quarter the circle or break it down to 8 equal parts.  More simple designs were broken down to quarters, while more complex designs were broken down to 8 areas.  I encouraged, but did not require the use of a ruler to make sure the design was laid out evenly with the use of lines and shapes. These circles were drawn out on craft paper, then traced with sharpie.  The last step was to add in white with acrylic paint.  Most of these took two days, while more complex designs needed three art days to complete.

Fashion 101

This was an introduction lesson to fashion designing that we did with our 5th graders.  My teaching partner, Mrs. Findeisen, has done this lesson for years with the 5th graders.  I'll be honest, I was truly nervous about doing this lesson.  While I've done plenty of portraits before, I know nothing about fashion, believe me, I'm no Cassie Stevens!  Well, about 6 weeks into this lesson and many students still didn't have their croquis done, (I learned that a croquis is a rough sketch of a fashion model in various poses).

 I think that between being overwhelmed with creating a person in correct proportions and coming up with a fashion concept,t felt a little overwhelming to many.  I was overwhelmed.  You can see writing off to the side on some of the images.  She took the time to write about their progress to encourage them to keep going.

 In the beginning she showed each of the classes a youtube video of a fashion show from UT (clean, didn't have to worry about content here).  A word of advice, if you are searching fashion shows on youtube, finding appropriate material is very difficult!  After a while, I figured they just needed something to inspire them to finish these.  So I did find some great resources on youtube that seemed to do just the trick.

Here are a couple short videos that I found to be very helpful and the kids enjoyed watching.

How to render fashion drawings.

How does fashion design use math concepts?

This video is a bit longer, but I decided to show parts of it (it is a little long, so I fast forward through some parts).  Although this individual is not a perfesionnal, I loved that

she is very dedicated to has posted dozens of videos on fashion designing.  A great example of working hard to achieve a professional goal later on, very inspiring!

Fashion illustration by Zyra B.

The Royals of Elm Grove

Another art teacher in my district told me she did these with her kids and raved about how cute they were.  So, of course, I had to try them out.  These are my first graders self portraits as kings, queens, a princess, a prince or a knight.  These were the first round of finished pieces and they are adorable.  As always I have a few speedsters, (wish I could give speeding tickets in art) that I have to figure out what they were going to do.  I hate centers, so that isn't an option for me, ALL of them become law breaking speedsters and their artwork looks terrible if I make it available.  And I can't stand that no matter how many times I send them back to work and improve, they are right back up, asking if they can go to centers and they do this till they wear me down- I hate being defeated!!  OK... (squirrel) back on track.  So here is what I did, I had them write at least five sentences on themselves as a royal.  They could write a story, tell about their kingdom, what kinds of things they do for their people, anything about themselves they could imagine as a king/queen or so forth. They are quite entertaining!  I think I may make them all do it now.  

I told them to sign their name with their royal title.



I also read to them this great book by Leah Wilcox! Super cute and funny!

Eagle Art

My 4th graders have been working over the last 6 weeks on these eagle watercolor paintings.  This is the first round of completed pieces and I am pleased with the outcome. This is taking a bit longer to wrap up, but because my teaching partner and myself decided that we would do our own individual projects for a while.   I was on the search for inspiration on eagle art, since the school mascot is an eagle, and found this art piece to inspire my 4th graders. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/120119515032746490/  

Students used one day to practice their eagle drawings.  The second day was used to finish practicing and draw the eagle on larger, thicker paper.  The eagles were then outlined with ultra thin sharpies.  Because of I required them to break up the space in the body and create different patterns and designs in these spaces it is taking them 3-5 additional art days to fill in the watercolor.  The outside is one color to emphasis the eagle and a salting technique is added on the background to create a subtle texture.