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: