In the past two weeks we have had two early release Fridays and two Monday vacation days, which leaves only about half of the classes available for working on art projects.
So, let’s start with last week. We had plenty of activity, despite the limited crowd. A special guest, Mr Roy G. Biv was invited to join k-4 in the studio but, unfortunately, he was unable to join us. He did send a lesson plan to help us remember the colors included in the spectrum.
And we introduced a new tool for making parallel lines that allowed our East End artists to make beautiful curved ribbons spanning our papers. We then applied watercolors to create a variety of rainbow ribbons. The trick was to maintain the Roy G Biv order of colors throughout the project. Here are a few examples of the work from Mrs. Engel’s second grade class.
The upper grades stuffed our studio with more stools! We applied our knowledge of negative space to create pastel drawings of our tennis ball footed studio stools. With over 30 real stools in the room and an additional 25 drawings from Mr. Socia’s class hanging on the walls, we celebrated an icon of our studio. We carefully considered perspective in our drawings and students had the freedom to choose how to represent our fluorescent tennis balls! Enjoy the work created by Mr. Socia’s artists displayed on the walls in our studio!
Another rather brief week cut down activity in the studio to a total of ten classes. Our morning kindergarten artists did spontaneous mark making with the help of a little jazz trumpet music. The tables were covered in newsprint and nearly every known marking tool in the studio was available to our young artists. In a “musical chair” type fashion, artists experimented with different tools for the length of a full song. Before the next song began, artists moved two chairs to the left to a new position. This continued through 6-7 songs. Enjoy our mark making mural on the walls of the main stairwell.
To fight the blahs of gray winter days, first and second graders learned how to reduce a bird to three basic shapes. An egg shape creates the body and a head, a triangle creates a beak, a feather tuft and tail feathers – and red paint creates a beautiful cardinal breaking up the shades of grey and brown of a dreary January day.
