A Night of Art

We are coming up on one of my favorite days of the month: First Thursday Art Walk!

http://www.firstthursdayseattle.com/index.php

From around noon to 8:30 pm on the first Thursday of each month, Seattle's downtown galleries and museums including the SAM, the Frye, Asian Art Museum and EMP open their doors for an evening of visual and theatrical art.

When you head down there, I strongly recommend browsing the 619 Western Ave Arts Building to view an eclectic collection of contemporary artwork, as well as getting a first-hand view into the artists' studios.

Also, the Toshiro Kaplan Building in Pioneer Square houses quite a few galleries which range from Folk Art to modern sculpture. If the weather is good, you might catch performance art taking place on the streets just outside.

If you live on the East Side and are unable to make it to First Thursday, the Bellevue Art Museum participates in First Fridays, in which admission is free from 11am to 8pm.

http://www.bellevuearts.org/index.htm

The art room has burst with energy as the students are now deeply involved with exciting art projects. Here's a little taste of what we've been up to...

-Kindergartners are learning great drawing skills as they embark on the challenging process of learning how to draw anatomically correct self-portraits. Wave goodbye to stick-figures!

In doing this, we looked at the realistic self-portraits created by da Vinci, Frida Kahlo and Chuck Close, in addition to more abstract self-representations created by Salvador Dali and Vincent Van Gogh.

Self-Portrait-Chuck Close Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon-Salvador Dali

-The first graders started off the year studying and drawing their own Mandalas. When creating these they incorporated radial symmetry to create a harmonious combination of shapes and designs. We later studied Color and turned our mandalas into color wheels which include all of the Primary colors, hand-mixed Secondary colors, as well as their Tints.

-After reading and analyzing the pictures in Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, the second graders are applying phenomenal drawing skills to create their own 3D Wild Things. I am extremely excited for the inking phase which will begin next week!

-The third grade students began the year learning about Pablo Picasso, discovering why his painting style changed so drastically over the period of his life. Inspired by Picasso's painting Three Musicians, which takes on a collage appearance, the students are assembling their own portraits using only paper cut-out and glue. The work in progress:

Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso

-Fourth graders are using the Facial Mapping technique developed by Leonardo da Vinci to draw proportionally sound rendering of themselves based off of dramatic photographs that we took.

Finally, the fifth graders have learned how to draw a variety of fonts and font renderings which they applied to designs that they drew of their names. They made their own transfer paper and are in the process of tracing their names 4 times to create lovely radial designs.

Here are a few students tracing their name designs:

And we are back in action....

Good day to all,
I can't begin to describe how fabulous it is to be back for my third year teaching at OWS!
I am discovery that every year here gets better and better. I not only feel great about finally having all 300+ of our students' names memorized, but I am now able to have the wonderful experience of observing years of development. Every time I return to school in the late summer, I am astounded to see how much our students grow over the short span of 2 months...There is nothing more gratifying for a teacher then to watch your students' talents and skills flourish with age!

In the first week of school, I have had a great time meeting all of the wonderful new faces at OWS and warmly reminiscing with the old. Week two will be when we fire up our creativity and blast into the world of art.

Take care,
Gretchen Leggitt


Here I am at the finish of a 1,000 mile bike ride I took to San Francisco this summer!