Van Gogh Starry Night Snowglobes

This is a wonderful December lesson that incoprorates the holiday season as well as an art history component with Van Gogh's Starry Night painting.

I found this lesson HERE on the Painted Paper website. 

For the villages, we used these amazing village drawing booklets found HERE on the art blog Art with Mrs. E.  Totally worth the money and I am CHEAP, so you know it's good.

I pre-traced a large circle on heavy white 9 x 12" paper.  Grade 4-6 students looked at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting and drew their own village. It could anything they wanted. They added swirls in the sky to mimic his style. They also drew their own base for the snow globe.

They outlined everything in Sharpie.

Then coloured using pencil crayons. Some painted the sky with watercolours. 

Once dry, cut out.

Some early finishers:

 

Tim Burton Inspired Clay Portraits

This is a really fantastic lesson I found on a public Facebook art group 

"ART TEACHING EXCHANGE".

 It was posted (public group) by Amber Pitre who has a private home art studio. 

We started off with a slideshow of Tim Burton's work and films. My students don't know any of his older films (Beetlejuice, etc- *crying emoji*). We discussed the similarities of his characters and the dark and Gothic style nature of it all. 

So, following her instructions, I picked up these 4x6" wood frames from Michaels. They didn't have the exact number I needed, so I had to go searching at other stores to find small wooden frames. 

Student started by removing he cardboard from their frame and painting their frame with black acrylic paint. They wrote their names on the back. They chose a piece of scrapbook paper and traced their carboard backing onto it and glued that down. This serves as the 'wallpaper'. 

I gave each student a sheet of parchment paper to work on to create their model magic portraits.

Many student even drew out a little plan on the parchment even though I didn't ask this of them.

Because these are quite small, this only took one period (about 50 minutes). Student found out pretty quickly that it's tricky to get really small, fine details with model magic (it's so foamy) but they did pretty good! These need to dry overnight at least.

The next class they were painted using acrylics.

While they waited for these to dry, they used white paint pens to draw swirly 

and whimsical patterns on their frames. 

Then they hot glued their portrait onto their frame. I think my kids really enjoyed this project!

 

Texture Hands

This is a project I've seen floating around the internet for a while. I couldn't find the originator of this lesson so, if you know, please leave a comment so I can give attribution!

This was a great lesson for me to teach as I seldom address the art element of texture in my projects.

Grade 4- 6 students started by tracing their hand and drawing the crease marks of their palm for realism. The, on each finger, they had to draw a different texture. I showed them how to shade for added depth. Then, they needed to add colour to at least two fingers. I think these are so fun and creative!