Three Expressive Trees

 It's been great getting to meet all the new 3rd graders to our building. You see, they are new because Kindergarden through 2nd grade is located at a separate school.

Here they are in the art room having a go at the first lesson of the year.  We did a silhouette of 3 expressive trees.  Then they added color with acrylic and tempera.  Finally they filled the sky using the do a dot markers for a very impressionistic and expressive sky.

I will give some step by step details in another post soon. 

We were very proud of the results and our school will display these at the Harvest Concert in a few weeks.  Lovely job, third graders.  You are a talented group.

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.

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.

Animals In the Style of Mondrian

Piet Mondrian's Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue


I have shared two art prints of Piet Mondrian's Boogie Woogie with my 3rd grade classes. Each was a different version from his series called Boogie Woogie. We started to get familiar with some other pieces of his work too. I also showed a photo of a dress that was inspired from his painting. Did you know that Nike has designed athletic shoes that are styled after Mondrian's work too? The trademark slash is black, but the rest of the colors are red, blue, yellow, and white.


Nike Low Dunk shoes released in 2008


Afer having a little discussion about the art examples, we set out to create a large animal silhouette from white cardstock. I had a small booklet of animal shapes that I made from various silhouettes I had found on-line. They looked at frog, giraffe, fish, kangaroo, fox, dolphin, before they considered which they would draw. I showed them how to visualize a box around the animal to see which parts may nearly touch the edge when the animal was enlarged. The students tried to make their animal as large as the paper. We stacked our pattern on top of white cardstock and paper clipped the corners to allow us to cut through both layers.



I will have artwork to post in the blog later.