Gerhard Richter is a contemporary German artist who is well-known for his photorealistic paintings that he then blurs using a soft brush or squeegee. He is also famous for creating abstract paintings and then using a squeegee to scrape away paint.

For this project, we painted two sheets of paper the primary colors. When painting, we had to work thickly and quickly with our paint so that it wouldn't dry. After students had covered their papers with the primary colors, they used a strip of tagboard to scrape away the paint on their paper. As they scraped, the primary colors would mix together and create the secondary colors. The kids thought this was the COOLEST THING EVERRRRR and I thought it was pretty cool too for re-learning our color mixing! As they scraped, they could also change the pressure to their scraping and it would create different effects on their paper.

I saw this project floating around somewhere on Pinterest and thought it would be a great chance to touch on shapes again with me first graders!

Reggie Laurent is a contemporary artist who makes abstract paintings. His artwork features brightly colored shapes on a black background. The shapes vary from geometric to organic. On top of the shapes, he paints vibrant lines and patterns.

Throughout the project, we talked a lot about the difference between organic and geometric shapes. I usually say that geometric shapes are shapes that have a name or that they are shapes with a lot of straight edges. Organic shapes are shapes that are blobs. We cut out tons of organic and geometric shapes and glued them to a black background. When gluing, we glued so that our shapes didn't touch each other. Our scissors were SUPER hungry so we did TONS of cutting. We recapped on using our glue properly too.

The 2nd class, we finished up cutting and gluing. After that, we used a white crayon to create squiggly lines between our shapes. Lastly, we used construction paper crayons to add lines and patterns to our shapes.

This is a project that I saw over at jamestownelementaryartblog.com

James Rizzi was an American Pop Artist who is most well-known for his fun, bright, and cartoon-like depictions of skyscrapers. His skyscrapers typically feature faces with various expressions.

We kicked things off by talking about space in Rizzi's work. We noticed that just because some buildings were bigger than others, doesn't mean that the bigger building was closer to us. We came to the conclusion that this idea of space was created by Rizzi's use of overlapping buildings. We also discussed the difference between foreground and background. We also talked about how buildings are typically made up of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. Students drew 3 large buildings and added faces and windows to them. They finished off the class by tracing everything they drew with a black crayon.

Next, we added 3 smaller buildings to go in our background and then traced them with a black crayon. We brushed up on ROY G BIV from last year and then used liquid watercolors to paint our buildings in rainbow order.

On the last day, we finished up painting our buildings. Then painted our sky black. Lastly, we did some splatter painting with white paint to add stars to our sky.

With our recent string of warm weather, I've been all about summer-inspired projects! This was a project that I saw over at Create Art with Me's blog. It took us two days to do it but we probably could've stretched it out to three days if we had decided to add some more details.

We spent the first day re-touching on the idea of space and how we can create it in our artwork. I was impressed that the students remembered the three different ways to create the illusion of space (changing color, size, and overlapping)! We took this into consideration when we drew our mighty sandcastles! Students were free to add details such as flags, draw bridges, etc. They also drew things like starfish and shells in the foreground (also super impressed that they remembered the difference between foreground and background)! After they finished drawing, they traced everything with a black crayon.

They second day was spent painting with liquid watercolors and tempera cakes. As always, we also talked about proper use of Mr. Brush!

 First grade did two mini projects based on Dale Chihuly. Chihuly is probably the most famous glass artist in the world. He actually graduated from Madison for his masters degree. I had the chance to see one of his works during spring break.

 The first part of the project, students colored on coffee filters. When they were finished, I wrapped the coffee filters over a paper tube and then sprayed them with liquid starch. This caused the filters to harden up a bit and to look kind of like flowers. I don't have a picture of it but we used these as flowers along the vine that was put up behind the kids during their spring concert. They focused on using warm and cool colors on these.

​For the second part of the project, each student was given an old transparency. They thought these were so cool. Most had never seen them before and I had to explain what they were used for. Makes me feel old! Students used colored sharpies to create patterns and designs on their transparency. When they were finished, I drew a spiral onto their transparency. Then they had to cut out along the spinal that I had drawn. I collected all of the spiraled transparencies and combined them to make a large chandelier that now hangs in front of our courtyard. It looks beautiful in front of the light!

Mark Rothko is one of my favorite painters! I had a class of 1st and 2nd graders who were a day ahead of the rest so they both got to do a quick one-day project on him so that the others could catch up. Rothko liked to make really large paintings. He wanted people to stand close to his paintings so that the only thing they could see was his painting. He believed that he could use colors and their interactions with each other to make people feel different emotions.

Students hadn't used chalk in awhile so I thought this would be a good opportunity for them to use it. Students were asked to draw two or three large squares or rectangles on the center of their paper. They could leave a little bit of space between each shape or they could have each square or rectangle touch each other. I encouraged them to blend two different colors together for each shape. I didn't tell them which colors to mix together, but encouraged them to think about their knowledge of color theory. Lastly, they filled in the borders around their shapes.

 1st grade got to make two clay projects in a row! Lucky ducks! This was a project I got from another elementary art teacher in Milton who this with her students.

We started off by reading a bunch of facts from a book about cats. The kids loved hearing all of the interesting things about cats! After that, we talked about how we created a pinch pot on the previous project and how we could use that shape to make the body of a cat. After making a pinch pot, students pinched two spots and indented two spots to create ears and eyes. Lastly, they learned how to roll a coil. A coil is like a clay snake and artists use them to create details, pots, and other things from clay.

After that Clay had been fired, we use tempera paint to finish them off.