Jim Dine 4 Hearts Art Project

Here's another fast and easy Valentine's art project with an art history component. 

I saw this on an Instagram reel from @scholtenart. I altered the last time a bit.

This was the first project I did with a new set of Grade 4-6 students. Honestly, it was easy for alot of the older kids, but the boys, especially, needed help and reminders with cutting and gluing and all those fine motor skills that boys sadly seem to lack compared to girls. This took my classes one 40 minute period to complete. 

This is the first year I've tries tempera paint sticks and they are fantastic! It's like drawing with a really slick, smooth, colorful glue stick!

I pre-cut heavy white paper into squares (9" x 9") and then pre-cut coloured photocopy paper into squares that would fit onto that in 4th (I can't really explain math, lol)

Students covered the white paper with patterns using paint sticks.

Then they chose two squares of a colour, stacked them and cut out a heart shape. 

Review positive and negative space.

Glue stick these onto the background like so. Then we used black and white pencil crayons to add some shading and highlights to the hearts. 

I love how fun and colourful these turned out!

 

Pop Art Snowflakes

I was originally inspired to make these from a post on the Artsonia website. 

http://www.artsonia.com/

I showed Grade 4 kids examples of Warhol's paintings, specifically his work that is gridded (the flowers, Marylin Monroe, Mickey Mouse, etc).

We took regular colored photocopy paper, chose 2 colours, 2 sheets each and cut them into a square shape.  This was the background.  We glued these onto a larger sheet of white paper.

For the snowflakes, simply trace a large circle, (use a lid or compass), cut it out, fold, fold, fold and cut shapes into it.  Unfold and voila!  Glue one each onto the colored squares with a gluestick. You could also make the snowflakes out of colored paper and glue them onto black paper or a contrasting colour.  I'm going to try that next.

Careful when gluing; they are delicate.

Ta da!

Wayne Thiebaud Dessert Paintings

Grade 10 students learned about the art of American Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. I brought in a bunch of cupcakes and donuts and the students spent some time drawing and shading them in their sketchbooks first. Then they started with acrylics- mixing colors, building up layers and shading and highlighting. Some used acrylic thickener medium to give a real impasto effect to the frosting.

These cupcakes remained scarily 'preserved' for the two weeks that we used them....

mixing different tints to get realistic shading for the pink frosting

adding the white highlights last

Great job Grade 10's!

glued on real sprinkles

detail showing the actual thick texture