Week 4: Cursive Insects

Here was a fun project inspired by several of my favorite art teacher blogs.  Its also another way to incorporate the kids' names into a  project.

The first step was to have the student choose two different colors of paper, one for the background and one for the "insect."  They fold the foreground page in half long-ways.  With the fold down, they write their name large and in cursive with the fold as the baseline. Ignore descenders.  Then they can make a bubble outline around their name or just eyeball it. Using scissors they cut ut their name, making sure to leave enough areas along the fold so as to not separate the two halves. (even if you do that fine, though). Then they unfold, glue down and decorate.  Sometimes they end up looking like aliens or birds or frogs. It a lot of fun. Much like an inkblot test.  Can you decode the names?

Week 3: Modigiliani Self Portraits

I like to do several self portraits each year, usually in different media.  It gives the kids a measuring stick as to their art improvement and makes a great piece to keep.

This week we did self portraits in the style of Modigliani, the Italian painter know for he exaggerated and elongated faces.  The distortion inherant in this style is perfect for the imperfect manner in which most kids draw, so perfection is not the goal, but expression is.  Often this lesson is harder to teach then straightforward art.

The class was pretty simple. I gave each kid a piece of black paper and oil pastels. The only other rules were to make the head and/or neck distorted.