Georgia O'Keefe Skull Project

 By Aston 

In 5th Grade today we are doing a Georgia Okeefe Lesson, but I changed it up, instead of the flowers, we're doing her Cow Skulls,  I'm teaching 2 classrooms at the same time, I'll be running back and forth between the two.  We'll see how it works.  One classroom I'll have them working on a southwest inspired tissue paper landscape, complete with mesas and cactus.  The other classroom will work on putting details on and painting pre cut out cow skull.
Here is a link to the slide talk....
GeorgiaOKeefe slide talk

It was a success.  I used large pieces of water color paper for the background, and placed out a stack of tissue paper.  I told them to wet their paper with modge podge,  in sections.  Starting with the sky, they put a sheet of light blue tissue paper on the top half of the watercolor paper.

Then I told them to use two shades of the same color, dark for the background mountains and lighter color for the foreground mountains,  layering them gives a middle ground.  I also encouraged them to tear the paper, and to try to leave plateaus in the background, (flat topped mountains) to give it a more southwest look.  

All the Tissue paper was put down with modge podge, or diluted glue, careful not to tear the paper, then the desert colors were put down on the bottom third.  They used Browns, tanks, whatever they chose for the colors, some put a wide swath of brown and decided not to put any green cactus in, anything is ok.  

While those were drying, I had them work on the cow skulls,  I precut them out so they didn't have to do that part.  I showed them a few samples of where markings could go on them, and had them use brown sharpies to mark the eyes, nostrils, horns, details, then they could either wash them with a diluted metallic terra on the way! Brown paint, or do watercolor designs.  Whatever they wanted to do.

The next day, I had them put a last layer of modge podge over the background to give it a shine and make it even.  They put the skulls onto their southwest backgrounds with glue.

They look great!

By Caleb

By London

Making adorable felt animal ornaments

For our school auction Christmas tree we are going to have the fifth-grade class so and stuff Woodland animal ornaments for the tree.

Here is the ornaments that were going to do.

 I cut the felt over a few days, and preassembled the animals for the kiddos. They just need to stitch around the edges. For those that don't want to so a.k.a. (boys )they can also assemble cute pinecones owls for the tree.

How to do a basket stitch. 

I don't remember where I found the link to the felt ornaments, and directions, but it was on Pinterest, My favorite go to site for ideas.  I'm always on it.  Well, the craft went well,  of course half the class took awhile to figure it out,  I precut the thread into manageable sizes and put an entire animal ornament and thread into one Baggie.  In hindsight, I should have pre threaded the needles for them.  But with 42 kids in two classes, that would have taken a loooong time.  Once they stitched their ornaments,  I had them hot glue the eyes and noses etc on.  Later, I took the ornaments and threaded them with string to hang them on the tree.  Voila, a camping themed tree for the auction.  They loved stringing popcorn too,  I recommend doing that outside,  more ended up on the floor and in their mouth than on the strings.



 This is the felt that I purchased for this project.

May 2015 Art Fair and Auction

Wow, the art fair and auction is finally done. Everyone was so creative with the class projects. They auctioned off for quite a bit of money this year. I loved our 4th grade class the best. It was a string art project and we used one of the kids in the class-old fence scraps, copper nails, white string. And this is what I came up with. 

Here's some of the other classes works of art. Sorry for the bad photo angles but there is a lot of interest in the artwork and it was tough to get good shots- I guess that's a good problem right?

Love this one out of jelly beans

This was rolled paper. Here's a close up

Such beautiful artwork by all the classes and of course the amazing job of our teacher Crystal Cruse. It's amazing what she  does for the school she had every single student in elementary school artwork framed and on display to raise some good money. 

Pointillism Hearts

Seurat, Georges Pierre |səˈrä| (1859–91), French painter. The founder of neo-impressionism, he is chiefly associated with pointillism, which he developed during the 1880s. Among his major paintings using this technique is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86).I can't believe this whole time I haven't done an art masterpiece on Seurat  I just love his work! For going to do a pointillism work just in time for Valentine's Day. I cut out heart templates and using painters tape, taped them onto watercolor paper.

I decided to use cool colors with different values for the background and warm colors with different values for the heart. 

The acrylic paints are nice and thick instead of tempura. I cut Q-tips in half so there was a tip for each color on their palette. Sometimes the Q-tips get a little squishy, so it helps to have more.
I started them off painting the background. We talked about color and value. They tried to make the edges of the painting and heart were darker in value. Make sure they overlap the edge of the heart. 

Nice dots, random pattern, use all the colors. 

When the back is done, remove the heart template and fill the heart in with dots of warm colors. Concentrate the darker shades in the edges, lighter shades toward the middle, also denser and lighter towards the center to give it shape.  

The last step I showed them how to use a little black sparingly to dot around the edges.

We will be doing a pointillism painting for valentine's day after we learn a little about Seurat and Pointillism!

Here is the link to the slideshow.