Prep masterpieces continued

I have studied masters in art a few times with Preps and they never cease to amaze me so I have made this a part of my program for a few years now. We study a famous artists work for one lesson looking at content, colour, things that they notice that are special etc then they create a picture in response using similar techniques. Our first work was Vincent Van Goghs 'Starry night'. We discussed his small brush strokes and swirly unrealistic patterns, his use of dark colours to depict night time etc and this is what they came up with!

We then studies work by Vassily Kandinsky

We also looked at the work by Katsushuka Hokusai 

'The Great Wave off Kangawa' 

and created these fabulous prints.

Mixed media self portraits with Grade 5 and 6

I got this idea from another wonderful art teacher who is the queen of multimedia and printing. In this one project Grade 5 and 6 students learnt how to do paint scraping, pattern work, zentangles, how to make a stencil as well as sketching and drawing techniques. It took half the term but the results and the amount of skills they learnt was well worth it.

Prep 'Places'

I love recycling things that I find around the art room and the school. I found a big box of old contact lying around so the Preps made 'Night time city scenes'. 

I wish I had more photos of these because they were pretty special. 

Patterns and Printing

The Grade 1 and 2 embarked on a pattern and printing spree this term. They experimented with as many different ways to print and make patterns as we could fit into one term. They printed through doileys, printed with corks and other found objects. They made repeated line patterns with fine liners pens as well as creating back and white painted patterns. On completion they were asked to create a collage of any topic they liked but they had to use at least one piece if each experimented that they had done. We discussed that a printed doiley could be a lions mane, or a flower or a cloud etc and they went from there. The results were amazing!! I can't say how much I love them. They were colourful, dynamic, funny and thoughtful. It was a real pleasure to see them trying to work out where to put everything and to see what their work looked like when finished.

Below are some of the finished mixed media collages

There was even a couple of 3D works that came of this project like this little guy.

Australian Landscapes through the ages

I love to do mixed media collages with my students as much as I can and this term with Grades 3 and 4 we studied two artists whose work looks at the Australian landscape in two very different ways. We researched the work of Eugene Von Guerard and Rosalie Gascoigne.
For the Guerard influenced pictures I encouraged the students to really focus on overlapping to create depth and distance and to think about how to create a dense looking scene. With the Gascoigne inspired pictures it was all about pattern and repetition. I think both turned about pretty good but then again I have some pretty great students! The students responses were as follows;