Our Eiffel Tower Paintings

I learned from my blogging friend Barb at The French Elements that the Eiffel tower was celebrating their 120 birthday. She had posted a very neat video clip of the light show that was held in the months of October through December.

Here are photos of three paintings by my 3rd grade students! Everyone had such amazing results, I'm sorry I don't have more photos included right now. I will add a link later to take you to our schools artsonia gallery.

Our Animal Molas

The mola applique pieces came out beautifully by the entire class of 4th grade students. We layered the cut outs by building upwards instead of cutting through. They designed the animal on scrap manilla paper that was cut to 9" x 12". That way most of them were large enough to be the main motif, but small enough to have room in the background for the floating repeated shapes. I am very pleased with the results.

Our school enjoyed having them hang in the cafeteria. They are now stored away as we will have a special expo at the shopping mall at the end of January and some will be shown again at the Pump House art gallery when Aquinas Schools has their elementary show.

The stacked colors really look marvelous in all of the student work. I think either the rectangle or the oval worked well for background fills. I prefer the oval, but it is a bit more work to make all these shapes. The students were aware of stacking the paper to cut more than one layer at a time.

I am glad we tried these pieces this year. It really helped enhance our studies of world art and they were enjoyed by many people the day we had our United Nations Celebration. This is a lesson I would definitely repeat.

Animals With a Mondian Grid

Earlier this school year, I introduced the third grade students to Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. We saw some reproductions of his "Broadway Boogie Woogie" and "Victory Boogie Woogie". We made note of how he gridded his canvas and used pure hues of the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.

The students designed an animal on scrap manilla paper. I told them to draw it so at least 3 parts of the animal touched the edge of the paper. They cut these out to use as a pattern on the white cardstock. They transfered just the outline of the animals contour shape. Inside the animal the students drew straight lines in permanent ink to form a grid. They began forming a pattern of squares and rectangles and colored each space separately. Many found out that it was easier to color a few squares while they had the marker uncapped. Then open the next color and color some more. In the end they needed to be more careful, because we tried to not color the same color in an adjacent square. Black and white were part of the design too! We framed these up on black backgrounds with cut squares and rectangles of the primary colors.

The original idea came from an article in the arts and activities magazine. I believe I saw the article posted on the website. Here is a link that will take you to the article called "Animals With a Mondrian Twist".

It was a successful lesson and the children were happy with the results. I was pleased to hang them with some beautiful flag art for the Veteran's Day program we had at school on November 11th.

If you'd like to see the entire class's work follow this link to our school's artsonia webpage.