Crazy Kinder Corn Cobs!

This was a really fun project that we did in October with the Kindergartners.  I had bought a bunch of sweet and Indian corn cobs from a farm outside town and I talked with the students about how autumn is a time of harvest.  How we plant, grow, and now harvest the crops that we eat.  I showed the students the Indian corn and we passed it around looking closely at all the colors and shape of each kernel.  I had cut the corn cobs in half and put in those corn cob picker things that you poke into the ends of the cobs to hold while buttering.  I set out six trays of paint, one on each table.  The three tables on each side of the room had the three primary colors.  I had my students all wear an art smock so they wouldn't get paint all over their clothes.  They each got a 12"x18" piece of paper which they carried from table to table, color to color.  They held onto the pokers and dipped the cob into the paint and rolled it all over their paper.  By overlapping the colors we discovered the we got all sorts of new colors similar to that of the Indian corn we looked at earlier.

In the next class, I showed students how to draw a corn cob shape.  I had a paint tray with five different colors on it and showed the students how dip our brushes into each color without mixing the paint.  We used all the paints on our brushes to make little kernel dots inside the corn cob shape we drew.  After we filled it all up with as many kernels as we could fit, we used white, brown, and yellow paint to make the husks on the end of the cob.  Fun project and the kids really loved painting with the corn cobs.

The Great Outdoors in the Art Room

Living and Teaching in a small town in Northern Wisconsin is perfect for me.  I am an avid outdoors man and love hiking, hunting, and fishing.  Most of the students in this area also enjoy these things and have grown up doing them, which has slowly had an impact on my class.  We talk about animals and the outdoors a lot, so I thought I would bring in a few strange animals that I had.  I brought in a stuffed armadillo and a pheasant mount and within a week had students bringing me all kinds of interesting an odd animal related things.  I have a buffalo and cow skull, multiple deer skulls and antlers, a snapping turtle shell, two alligator heads, and all sorts of cool weird things that my students have brought in for me to display.  It works out really well for still life drawings :)  I also started an outdoor picture board in my room.  I told students that they can bring me any picture (photo or drawing) that has to do with the outdoors or nature and I would hang it up.  We have tons of cool photos of fish, ducks, geese, deer, bears, and camping adventures.  The students love checking out all the other kids pictures.  Turned out to be quite a success.

Sign Language Self Portraits

This is a project that I came up with a couple years ago and have had great success with.  I have only done it with sixth graders and it does take a long time to complete, but I was very happy with the results.  I suggest giving this one a whirl if you want a long lasting project with some great discussion, drawing, and watercolor painting.

I start this project talking with the students about self portraits.  I ask the students, what is a self portrait? In every class, students responded with "a picture of yourself."  This was perfect to start our discussion.  I ask them if it has to be a picture of yourself, could it be anything else?  What about a picture of your foot?  Or arm?  Does it have to be a painting?  Can it be a drawing or photograph?  This is when it got interesting.  Many students were troubled when asked if it could be a photograph.  I then asked them if a musician could make a self portrait through their music?  I saw light bulbs start going off and the "ah-ha" moments started happening.  Within seconds, students were saying things like "I think a self portrait can be anything about you."  This is the response I was looking for.  We talked and the discussion continued as I began a slide show.  I showed self portraits in the following order Rembrandt, VanGogh, Marc Chagall, M.C. Escher, Chuck Close, and Cameron Gray.  The order of these portraits went from a very traditional portrait in realism and got increasingly abstract and less focused on the actual representation of the face.  The way in which artists began to portray themselves became more and more about the way in which they did as opposed to the resulting portrait...the process over the product.  The students were hooked.  They were quite interested and were curious where our new project was headed.  I explained to them that we were going to make our own self portraits, not based on what we looked like but based on who we are.  We would be focusing on our hands, which are so very important in our art endeavors.  We were going to learn some sign language so that we could use our hands to portray our initials, after all, our given names are a huge part of who we are.  We would then be drawing our hands in the sign language poses for our initials.

In the second class, I gave each student a piece of scrap paper and a sign language alphabet handout.  I told them to pose their non dominant hand as one of their initials and try their best to draw it.  I gave no instruction or help, just wanted them to give it their best try.  Many of them struggled and almost all had draw a hand 1/2 the size of their real hand.  After about 7-8 minutes of this, we talked about how hard it was and I brought them over for a demonstration in which i broke the hand up into more manageable shapes and showed them how to measure things and determine approximate angles using their pencils.  They went back to their tables and tried again.  The second round was much better but many still struggled. I explained to them to just try their best and that next week I would show them an easier "almost cheating" way to draw an amazing hand.

When students came in for the third class they were very excited about this "cheating" way to draw.  I gave a demonstration on how we were going to use special stiff transparencies to "trace" over our hands.  In order to use the transparency easily, you can not simply place it over your hand and draw because it is not a flat surface, so I told the students that we were going to get comfy and relax a little today in art class...everyone got to put their feet up on the table to draw.  I told them not to tell any of the other grades otherwise they would all be super jealous haha.  By putting your feet up on the table while sitting in a chair, you can place your signing hand in your lap between your thighs and rest the transparency on both your legs and on your hand so that it is much more stable.  We then used Visa-Vi transperency markers to carefully "trace" our hand underneath the clear plastic.  I made a big deal about our heads not moving while drawing.  I had students sit in their drawing position and stare at their hand.  I then told them to move their head about 3-4 inches to one side of the other and to notice how much the perspective changed which parts of their hands they could see.  So with statue like stillness, the drawing began, making sure to draw all the creases, folds, scars, fingernails, and details that made their hand their own.  After drawing it out on the transparency, I asked students to look on the sign language alphabet sheet and tell me which hand was the one used to sign.  It is the right hand, but seeing that the majority of my students are right handed they had posed their left hand for the drawing.  I told them not to worry as Mr. Malcore had a way to fix this.  I handed out drawing paper for them to transfer their drawing on to and told all the right handed students that we would simply flip our transparency over to give us a right hand.  Luckily I have a bunch of great windows in my room that we used as tracing tables and the students transferred their hand drawings to their drawing paper. We continued this until all initials were complete.

In the following class, we talked about value and shading.  I gave a demonstration on how to shade a hand with pencil to make it appear three dimensional and more life like.  We talked about how anything that is further from your eye tends to be somewhat darker.  This is especially true when dealing with rounded or contoured shapes and forms like fingers.  The edges of each finger appear slightly darker or more shaded as they angle back around the backside of the finger, thus get further from the eye.  I demonstrated how to blend and how to cross hatch.  I then passed out a sheet with two contour hand drawings on it.  Students were to practice shading on these hands before trying it on their own.  I told them to create a gray scale on the top of the paper first, making their pencil lead as dark as possible and lightening it into the white of the paper.  I told them that a well shaded hand drawing will have the darkest dark, the lightest light, and most shades of gray in between.  Once all of their initials were shaded, we began talking about backgrounds.

For the self portrait backgrounds, I told the students that we were going to watercolor paint some sort of scene or image that told the viewer something about yourself, your personality, or what you like to do.  I left it pretty open so that the kids could turn it into whatever they wanted, after all, it is their self portrait.  I am lucky enough to have a computer for student use in my room which helped students find images and ideas for things to draw.  They drew everything out in pencil first.  I gave a demonstration on watercolor painting and talked about how important planning is to making a good watercolor.  I gave on demonstration on wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet watercolor painting and the students LOVED the wet-on-wet, especially when mixing lots of colors to get the tie dye effect.

Students worked for a few weeks on planning and painting their backgrounds.  Once finished, we cut out the hand drawings and used 3-D O's (little foam mounting risers) to put on the backs of the hands to give them a more 3-D look and fixed them to the backgrounds.  It took a long time to complete but the students were very proud and they turned out great.  Lots of different learning going on here, I highly recommend this one, give it a try and if you have questions please ask.

A Little Overlapping and Line Practice with Kindergarten

I wanted to cover some basic yet important ideas with my kindergartners and get them some more practice cutting and gluing so I talked with my good friend Matt from http://lawnim19artisticfreedom.blogspot.com/ and he told me about a contour line project he was doing.  I took the idea and ran with it.  The first class we talked about overlapping and I did lots of silly examples in our art room.  We then talked about lines: thick and thin, long and short, straight or crooked, and so on.  I handed out a 9"x12" paper to each student and then a whole bunch of scrape paper strips for them to cut into all sorts of lines and glue onto their papers.  We used the wonderful old adage "dot dot, not a lot" for gluing purposes.  Once students had attached 4-5 lines on their papers, I handed out some more colored scrap paper and we talked about how to draw shapes.  I gave each table a couple handouts with all sorts of different shapes on them.  Students could trace the shapes if they needed to or if we felt like "Professional artists today" we could try just looking at them and drawing them.  We cut out the shapes and overlapped the lines we had put on.

In the second class, I introduced the students to the contour line.  We talked about how it was very similar to an outline.  How it liked to keep moving, never breaking, or stopping until it made it back to where it started.  I turned my big white board in the front of the room into a larger version of the line and overlapping projects we made the week before using cut out construction paper shapes and lines.  I then used a white board marker and started a contour line in the corner of the board and drew along the edge of the board until I encountered the first obstacle.  I asked the students what to do.  They gave me directions on how and where to turn and draw so that I never ran into or touched any shapes or lines until I made it back to my starting point.  Once I thought that they all understood, I had them line up and told them that we were going to become a great big contour and walk around the room as the line.  Whenever we are going to run into something, we have to turn and follow the edge of it until we hit the next obstacle.  This was just to get them up and moving a bit, it was really fun and we had lots of laughs as the front of the line passed by and said hello to the back of its line.  I let the students use a variety of colored markers to create their own contour lines.  It was amazing to see how creative some students were with such a simple set of instructions.  Thanks Matt!!

This student used his lines and shapes to make Jesus on the cross...I was very impressed and thought he did an amazing job!!

Office Mural: Bulldog Pride

Our wonderful office staff at Peshtigo Elementary came to me about two months ago and asked if I would be interested in helping them spice up our school office with some Peshtigo Bulldog Pride! I agreed of course and they threw some ideas my way.  After about a week of planning I presented them with my idea and we ran with it.  After some extra hours in the office, we now have a BIG bulldog looking out over our school office.  I got to paint on two walls and they wanted to keep it simple and tasteful.  Let me know what you think!

Splatter Paint Weavings

I saw this AMAZINGLY cool idea on another blog @ http://dalimoustache.blogspot.com/search/label/3rd%20grade.  She always has some great ideas and inspiration on her blog so a big thank you to Mrs. Pfeiffenberger.  Immediately upon seeing this project I knew that I had to try it.

The first class I introduced Jackson Pollock and some of his earlier paintings (no splatter painting yet).  We had a great discussion about how his style and description of objects changed throughout his career and eventually evolved into a rapid and loose style, whereas the artists no longer tries to manipulate his or her media, but instead frees it and allows it to take control.  I showed the same video that was recommended on the Dali Moustache Blog along with a short clip from biographical movie about Pollock's life starring Ed Harris.  I then showed students a slide show of Pollock's top 20 most famous paintings and we discussed what we liked and didn't like about each of them. 

In the second class, we started to SPLATTER PAINT!!! This was a daunting task, and I must admit I was very nervous during the first class when we did this.  I had placed a large garbage bag on the floor next to each table.  I had collected some cardboard boxes that were big enough to place a 12"x18" sheet of paper inside and at least 12" deep in which we were to splatter paint.  I had given each table 5 bright colors of watered down acrylic paint in squirt bottles.  I gave a demonstration making sure to emphasize that every particle of paint that comes out of the bottle should end up somewhere inside the box...preferably on our papers.  I had that oldest student at each table start painting first and gave each student about 2 minutes to splatter and go crazy while each other student had a job such as clean up, paint tray holder, and box flap holder (one class of students figured out that if they helped each other hold up the open flaps of the box, there box got taller and allowed them more freedom for painting).  We did two rotations so each student got to paint twice and then we began clean up.  The boxes ended up looking SUPER cool too.

The third class was the one which students wanted to cry or beat me up.  I gave a big enthusiastic speech about how awesome their splatter paintings turned out and then I sprung it on them...now, we are going to CUT THEM UP!!! Haha I think a few of them actually wanted to hurt me.  Many said that they simply were not going to do it, but after they saw what we were turning them into they came around.  I showed students how to measure with a ruler to make long lines from on end all the way to the other on the long 18" side making sure to keep a 1" strip on an end to hold all of it together.  We measured and cut our painting into fringes so that it looked like a Hula skirt, and yes I did some Hula dancing with mine when I was done, heard a whole bunch of "Haha Mr. Malcore, you are so silly."  When they finished cutting the fringes, they chose two different colored 9"x12" sheets of construction paper and drew lines 1" apart all the way across the long 12" side. 

In the fourth class we began the weaving.  I showed students how to cut out their colored strips and weave them into their splatter painting.  Every other strip was the different color to create some variety.  We did lots and lots of "Over...Under...Over...Under."  I had students glue the ends of each strip into place so it wouldn't come loose.  Once finished weaving, we matted them and admired all of our hard work.  The kids really loved them and I think they turned out great.  I actually laminated four of mine and am currently using them as place mats on my diner table haha.

Owl Silhouettes

This project idea came about as a little mix of a project I saw from Sara Wilda at Franklin Elementary in Appleton, WI, and a neat blending project I found online.  I started by talking about cool and neutral colors along with what colors we could see in the winter and in the winter night.  I then introduced them to tints and shades.  I gave them a demonstration on blending on creating different tints and shades by using a palate with white, black, blue and purple paint.  I showed them how to blend the paint on paper by making parallel brush strokes overlapping the color before and after to create multiple shapes of each color along with a subtle blend into the next color.  For the first class, we talked about these things and then painted a 9"x12" using those four colors repeated as many times as they want.  We then used any remaining time to trace a coffee can onto yellow paper for a big full moon.  I showed students how to use white chalk to shade in the moon and add craters. 

In the second class, we reviewed what we learned about tints and shades.  I introduced the concept of a silhouette and where we usually see them.  After a little explanation, most of the students were positive that they had in fact seen one before haha.  We then talked about the moon for a bit and I transition the discussion into animals that come at night.  A surprising amount of them knew that animals who come out at night are called nocturnal.  I then had then come over for a demonstration on how to draw easy tree branches and an owl silhouetted against the moon.  I taught the students how to create a detailed tree branch by making large, medium, and small sized "Y" shapes.  We started by making one large "Y" which went off the side of the page.  We then added medium sized "Y"s which connect to the large "Y" and so on.  We practiced drawing them on the back of our paper first, then drew them in pencil over our cool sky painted background and traced with black paint.  We glued our full moons into the sky and made sure that at lest on of our branches touched or overlapped the moon so that we had a perch for our owl.  I then showed students how to make an owl using the letter "U" as the main body and adding pointed ears.  We then turned our paint brushes upside down and used the wooden tip to dip in white paint and make a starry night sky. 

The project turned out great and we have been getting a ton of great comments since they have been hanging up in the halls.  I highly suggest giving this one a try.