Klee Complete

To finish up our Klee project with the First Grade classes, we did a color wash.

This is really simple to do...
I pop out some black watercolor ovals from the Prang sets, place them in a dish and pour some water over them.  I do this so there is NO temptation of mixing other colors into the black paint....saves me some clean up in the long run.

I only let 6 to 8 students paint at a time.  It helps keep a little control of the black paint.  As they finish covering their picture with the watercolor wash, I use a rag to wipe the puddles off and then into the drying rack.

Check out the awesome art!

Hot Days - Cool Klee

I love the beginning of the year with First Grade classes.  We get to look at the art of a very cool artist named Paul Klee (pronounced Klay.....do you get the reference now of Hot Days - Cool Klay?)

He used the greatest shapes and awesome colors in his art.

Learn more about Paul Klee here.

We started in class with an idea of Continuous Squares.  I forgot to snap a picture of this, so bear with me..... I made a little jpeg image.

Once the crayon starts moving.....

Keep it moving until the squares are complete.

We use a black crayon to start.

No mistakes - remember?  

......no erasing either.

I do remind the kids to fill the space of the paper.
We don't touch the edge or let the lines run off the edge.

Then the students start to add color.  We talk about color and color choices. Bright colors are a great choice for this project, but I don't want to give them too many clues about what is next.  I just try to steer them away from coloring with black crayon.  I use an excuse that I really LOVE to see the black line of the squares.  We also talk about trying to color some of the squares white....we just have to remember WHICH squares we choose for the white crayon.

And then we start to color

HARD, 

HARD, 

HARD!

The shinier the crayon on your paper....the better.

Learning to Share

Each year, I do a project with the second grade students based on the book "Rainbow Fish" by Marcus Pfister.

We talk about SHAPE. What shapes can fish be?
We talk about SPACE.  The goal is to use the space of the paper to create our fish.
We talk about LINE.  Line quality  and space becomes important on this project because we are going to draw with GLUE!

The kids practice drawing a few fish and then I give them each a 9X12 piece of black construction paper and a bottle of glue.

Gloppy glue drying. The glue will dry clear on the black paper.

They draw.......there are NO mistakes in art!

Most of the drawings have to stay flat on the table to dry overnight.

At our next class, we talk about COLOR.

The kids are always excited when we pull out the oil pastels!

I have them choose one color for their fish.  We find every shade of blue, green, orange and purple we can find in the boxes and we work on blending.



The final treasure of this piece is pulling out the glitter to share a sparkly scale.

The art was great this year!
I hope you enjoy.....