Heather Galler Inspired Owls

This project was loosely based on the art of folk artist, Heather Galler. She is heavily pinned on Pinterest and has a large shop on Etsy. Her colorful and patterned filled animal art make great springboards for art lessons. My students chose large or extra large black paper for their compositions. They followed a basic line drawing lesson to create their owls and could then decide how detailed they would like to go with patterns and designs. Pencil drawings were gone over with black oil pastel and then filled with color. Artwork by K through 4th graders.

Raccoons

 4th

 Kinder

 Kinder

 3rd

 3rd

 Kinder

2nd

Let it be said that a 5 year old wielding a stick of charcoal is a wonderful and terrifying sight all at once.
: ) Every time I do a lesson in charcoal, inevitably I will bid farewell to my students and parents only to discover my face looks like I moonlight as a chimney sweep. (Why no one ever tells me, I'll never know)

That being said, it still remains one of my favorite mediums and worth every smudge. I revisited this raccoon lesson with my K through 4th grade group. We started our pencil drawings with a series of simple circle shapes and defined the face from there. These critters always seem to have a lot of character....just like the artists who created them.

Geninne Inspired Collages

My experiment

Geninne Zlatkis is a wonderful contemporary artist best known for her elegant bird artwork. My current class used her "Friends" piece as our inspiration. In lieu of a vintage map, we used old dictionary pages for our base. The divided page was then washed with watercolor. I gave the children warm and cool color acrylics to create textured paper that they later used to create their birds and fish. Oil pastels were used to add more color if they wished, as well as to add their lotus flowers. Birds and fish were cut out and glued to their compositions. Lastly, some scattered stars were created using the ends of their brushes. Artwork by kinders thru 4th.

Georgia O'Keeffe Style Flowers

 4th

This artist was not happy with her close-up rose. I'm still scratching my head:

it is the epitome of  Georgia O'Keeffe's style. Gorgeous!

 5th

 

2nd

 Kindergarten

5th

You know it's spring when you start to see the O'Keeffe style flower projects around the blogs. She is a favorite artist of mine and ironically, I almost went to the University of New Mexico before I decided to head south. I have done my fair share of O'Keeffe flower projects: tissue paper and acrylic, watercolor, black glue line, and oil pastel and watercolor resist. But I think these straightforward chalk pastel on black pieces are my favorite to date. My students used view finders to crop photos of flowers I had collected from books and calendars. This is always a bit confusing and disconcerting at first, especially when asking the children to blow up a 6" photo to 12" X 18". But with a little guidance, they got it!