So many circles

I am tickled to display the finished circle collages. The young artists in the children's house classroom did a fabulous  job, giving their best effort to a challenging repetition procedure work of art. 

This coming week we will follow up this lesson with an artist study on the very yummy work of Wayne Thiebaud. 

Henri Matisse Collage

First grade has spent the last two weeks studying the life and artwork of a well known french artist, Henri Matisse. 

He would then cut beautiful, organic, free-flowing shapes with scissors. He rarely threw away any scraps.

When Matisse was nearly seventy-two years old, he became ill and it was difficult for him to stand and paint. His illness did not restrict his creativity. He began a new technique, which he called, "painting with scissors", which was painting large sheets of paper with different colors using gouache, an opaque watercolor.

Snow Flowers, 1951

He would then cut beautiful, organic, free-flowing shapes with scissors. He rarely threw away any scraps.

The first graders focused on organic and geometric shapes, and fine motor hand development in cutting out each shapes. Check out our fantastic examples below.

Beautiful example of organic shapes

Lovely composition

Well planned out and neat

Exploding Boxes

Third grade was challenged by one of my most favorite problem solving art lessons. After discussing lines in our first class we moved right along to Space. 

As artists it is easy to concentrate on the main objects of a particular art piece or the positive space. Negative Space is the space between an object, around an object, and the opposite of an identifiable object. Negative space can be used to help define boundaries of positive space in any given piece of art. 

This lesson is a highly valuable lesson in the art curriculum. Through the positive negative space puzzle students will be engaged in a problem solving art lesson discovering the difference between the two areas within the picture plane. This lesson calls for students to use their prior knowledge of warm and cool colors as well as geometric and organic shapes to create a unique design puzzle. As a teacher it was enjoyable to watch the students design each shape and figure out how to place each piece correctly as a mirror image.