I am currently teaching three art classes for Kindergarten,
1st Grade and 5th Grade at my daughters school. It is always a challenge
to make the classes appealing to kids because the curriculum we currently
use is a bit outdated and sometimes too wordy.
Instead of just throwing the whole thing out the window, I've been taking the basic core lessons, but updating them with new artists that the kids might not know. I'd like to share how we learned to draw and paint like Britto, Longo, and
Warhol.
Kindergarten - Primary Colors
Objective -
Students identify primary colors on the color wheel and
discriminate primary colors from other colors.
For the lesson today, we looked at the artwork of
Romero Britto, a Brazilian painter and
sculptor who combines elements of cubism, pop art and graffiti painting in his
work. We used his flower painting as our inspiration.
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| Romero Britto |
First the kids learned how to use black watercolor paint for the main
outlines. We started by drawing a big circle in the middle of our paper
and then added six Cs that all wanted to hold on to it. We then put our
paper aside to dry and discussed the reason some of the papers were wetter then
others. I wanted to show them first hand why I always say "less is
more" when using water in watercolors.
Once circles were dry, and we'd looked at a few more of Britto's artwork for
inspiration, we got to work coloring in our petals with patterns and
shapes. Here are some of the examples of finished artwork:
1st Grade - Shapes Within Shapes
Objective -
Students create a drawing with a shape within a shape.
For the first graders, I really wanted to find a print that
had changed how art was viewed and decided to talk about
Andy Warhol and his impact on the art
world and commercialism. Warhol is an American pop art painter and
sculptor who passed away in 1987.
I started my power point presentation with an image of the
Mona Lisa, which of course sent hands flying of everyone that wanted to tell me
who she was, and we talked about how art was viewed when the Mona was
painted. I told them that portraits and landscapes were the primary art
forms until modern artists changed that with public shows. One of these
shows was Warhol's pivotal 1964 exhibit
The American Supermarket, where he
presented his Campbell Soup painting. He was one of the first artists to
tell everyone that you can paint anything you want, including everyday objects,
and of course the kids loved that.
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| Andy Warhol |
His painting was used as the perfect transition into talking
about artwork that had shapes within shapes, since it showcases a circle within
a cylinder. I also showed them all 36 Campbell soups that Warhol painted and
installed together, so that he created a pattern with the canvases,
not just on the canvases.
As with my kindergartener's, the first graders also used the
black watercolor paint to edge their soup cans. They were
then given red and yellow oil pastels for the rest of their
masterpieces. Here are some of our very own Tomato Soup
paintings:
5th Grade - Crosshatching for Value
Objective -
Students use line to crate value in still
life.
I had a hard time finding artwork for this lesson since
crosshatching is a necessary, yet boring, thing to teach kids. They just
don't like doing it and I usually have difficultly getting the lesson
through to them. This year, however, I stumbled upon the artwork of
Robert Longo,
an American painter and sculpture, and was blow away by his
Monsters series on waves.
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| Robert Longo |
Here was the perfect blend of how to talk about the values
in range, yet do so with an exciting subject matter. It was so
awesome to hear a few gasps from kids when I showed them the wave
images blown up at the front of the classroom. I love when artwork
creates a reaction.
Before we started on the waves, we took a 2B pencil and
a four by nine sheet of paper to created a value scale of
-White (leave blank)
-Light (draw vertical lines)
-Medium (draw vertical lines with horizontal lines on top)
-Darker Grey (draw vertical lines with horizontal and
diagonal one direction lines on top)
-Darkest (draw vertical lines with horizontal and
diagonal both directions lines on top)
I wanted them to have the value scale as a reference when
they were creating their waves.
Here are some of the artwork created by
them using 2B and 4B pencils, along with ball point pens:
Till next time, keep drawing!
