2nd grade Wolf Kahn Landscapes

Ohhhhhh, how I love Wolf Kahn's ethereal landscapes - the beautiful color combinations just pull me right into his work. I want to live in them! This is a great art lesson I enjoy doing each year with my 2nd graders. First, we look at Kahn's artwork in depth and then create a landscape in his style using lots of texture, bold colors and washes of watercolor paints! 

Pumpkins Under a Twinkling Sky by 1st grade

1st graders packed in a lot of learning with this pumpkin project! I meshed together an older lesson about starry night skies with pumpkins and I'm pleased with the outcome (I was inspired by a post at Deep Space Sparkle). On day one, we practiced drawing stars first. Once students felt confident, they used oil pastels to draw stars all over a piece of 12x18 blue construction paper. They painted the paper using black tempera cakes to create a resist effect. 

On day two, we reviewed color mixing and talked about how to draw pumpkins. Students were encouraged to draw their own pumpkin really big onto a piece of 11x14 art paper using pencil. Then we mixed yellow and red paint directly on our paper to fill in our pumpkins! 

On day three, we colored in the stem, traced the lines of the pumpkin with crayon, cut out some grass and glued everything down. The final step was smudged chalk for the highlights and a simple shadow on the ground. If students felt that too many stars were covered up by the pumpkin, they drew more on!! 

Puzzle Trees by 3rd grade

I had an excellent time teaching this landscape lesson that focuses on positive & negative space, warm & cool colors and an awesome scratching technique known as sgraffito. We used oil pastels on black paper and the results are very rich and exciting! Well done, 3rd graders!

Day #1: Students took one piece of 9x12 black paper and broke up the space into land and sky. A simple sun or moon was added as a symbol for the time of day. Students were asked to use one color family in the land, and the opposite family in the sky. We talked about coloring in heavily and overlapping colors.

Day #2: Students used toothpicks and paper clips to scratch into the surface of their work (with varying results). Then they flipped over their landscape and drew a simple tree with branches extending to the edges of the paper. The tree was cut out and placed aside. We glued our leftover pieces onto a new piece of black paper! The process was tricky, but the kids really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of this!!

Kindergarten Winter Scenes

 This winter landscape scene was created using the collage method.......and a lot of imagination since winter here in Georgia doesn't include much snow.

The first day of class, students drew snowflakes using simple crisscross lines with oil pastel, then overlapped bleeding tissue paper with water brushed on top to create the tie-dye effect.

The next session, we tore or cut some snow and glued it in the proper place on our tie-dye paper and discovered we had an instant landscape-----sky and ground! Students cut squares in half on the diagonal (the magic step) to get lots of triangles to form the evergreen trees. Overlapping and placement was a huge focus! Once the little forests were completed, we made snowmen. The cutting of circles was challenging for some, but as all the kids know: good artists do not give up!

4th grade Pumpkin Landscapes

I wanted to make sure I shared some pictures of my 4th grader's latest assignment....especially because autumn is coming to an end....here are our landscapes with pumpkins. This is a variation of a lesson I did last year. Space and depth plus shading were the major concepts covered as well as texture and placement. I really enjoy how these turned out, especially because each one has its own feel.