Art Room

The kindergarteners are exploring tempera paint this month. Students have been making free-style paintings while talking about primary colors, secondary colors and experimenting with color mixing.

Students work on their art each week in a large sketchbook. Most students will finish their sketchbook in time to bring it home before winter break.

The first graders began the month by exploring watercolor painting. We took inspiration from the changing colors of the leaves and tried to make our own fall leaves. Students tried different methods for getting their watercolors to blend together on the paper.

2nd graders have been working on landscape paintings. We have been learning about the background, middle ground and foreground and how to make an underpainting. An underpainting covers the work with a base pigment and allows the artist to continue to add work on top of the underpainting.

3rd graders recently completed a still life painting of a pumpkin. Students were only given primary colors and needed to mix their own secondary colors for this painting. Students also worked on creating tints and shades of colors. 3rd graders are just now beginning to take what the learned from this still life painting and apply it to a painting of a dessert in the style of the artist Wayne Theibaud.

4th graders are currently finishing up an outer-space scene in oil pastels. Students have been learning how to use oil pastels to blend colors in order to make a circle appear as a three dimensional sphere.

All of the 4th graders' art will be hung together in a way that creates one large space scene. All 58 fourth graders know where their piece fits into the overall art work and must collaborate with the artists whose work borders their own.

Below you will find the work-in-progress.

The 5th graders have been studying the use of value in drawing. After practicing using pencils to achieve a range of grays, students were tasked with creating a realistic still life drawing of an object of their choosing. The still life object was placed on a white piece of paper and we turned the lights off to reduce the number light sources. You can see in these images here that students were careful to observe the subtle nuances of their complex shadows.

5th graders are in the middle of their linoleum printmaking project. We are using the fall colors as a starting point. Each student drew a leaf on linoleum and used tools to carve out the areas that will be white in the final print. Next week, students will experiment with printing in multiple colors.