Only one of my 3rd grade classes got to learn about Maya Hayuk because they were a couple classes ahead of the other three classes.

Maya Hayuk is a living female artist out of Brooklyn. She creates large, geometric murals made of intersecting diagonals. The interesting creates an interwoven effect. Her murals use bright vibrant colors oftentimes overlaid on top of lighter colors. She uses a watered down paint that often runs down her walls. Because of the thinness of the paint, you can also see the mixing of colors when they overlap.

With Maya's work, we talked about the symmetry she creates. We also noticed that a lot of her paintings have light colors with bright vibrant ones painted on top. This use of color creates a sort of space or depth to her artwork, similar to the effect that we got from some of Frank Stella's paintings a couple months ago.

I showed students how to line up a strip in the center of their paper and then mirror a strip across from it on the other side of the paper. This created a "V" shape with the paper strips. I encouraged them to use various colors, to overlap, and to turn their paper upside down so that they had paper strips going both directions. The first day was spent using light tints of colors.

The second day the students continued to add strips, this time using brighter colors to help create that sense of space/depth.

I've seen these pictures of stained glass floating around Pinterest a lot and also saw that Don Masse did it with his kiddos. You can check out his write up for it on his blog shinebritezamorano.com

I'm really drawn to these pieces of stained glass for three reasons 1.) Their asymmetrical design 2.) Their use of similar colors on each piece and 3.) the organic feel that each one has.

This was a real quick one day project that my artists did. We started off by drawing five vertical lines. We talked about how using wavy lines creates an organic feeling while straight lines create a rigid geometric feeling. I emphasized that each line should end at a different spot. They then drew several horizontal lines across the vertical ones. Lastly, they needed to decided on a color scheme to color their stained glass with. They could color using warm, cool, or by picking one color and creating tints and shades of it.

3rd grade FINALLLLLLY worked with clay. I was starting to get worried we wouldn't be able to fit it in before the end of the year! We learned how to create the body out of a pinch pot. Students then created a coil which is like a clay snake. They could take chunks off of that coil and that manipulate them into different details they needed like eyes, eyebrows, feathers, etc. I stressed that they needed to slip, score, and smooth the clay detail pieces or else they would fall off in the kiln. After they got out of the kiln, we painted them with tempera paint. Students put their color theory knowledge to the test and were allowed to mix whatever colors they wanted. I was impressed with how well they knew which colors could be mixed and which colors didn't mix well!

In our last project, we learned about Karina Eibatova's mineral paintings and painted tints and shades. I collected all of the strips of paper that our artists' painted tints and shades on and created a large collaborative artwork out of them which can now be seen hanging in our classroom.

We based our chandelier on the installation artist, Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is one of my FAVORITE artists. I love the way that he uses light and color to change a person's sense of space. I was particularly inspired by his work "Your Rainbow Panorama." This is an installation that is above a museum in Denmark. Viewers can walk through the colored glass-wall path. A video of the experience can be found below. 

I assembled the strips of tints and shades by color and created a gradient so that colors move from tints to shades and vice versa. Because there were not an equal amount of each colored strip, some spots of the chandelier are longer than others. I like the asymmetrical-ness of the piece.

With 3rd grades recent trip to Cave of the Mounds and all of their learning about rocks and minerals, I thought it would be cool to do a project based on minerals. We looked at Karina Eibatova's work for influence. Karina is a young Russian artist who moved from Russia to Sweden when she was 19. While in Sweden, she drew upon nature as inspiration for her works. While she depicts a variety of things from nature, I was really drawn to her mineral series.

We got the project rolling by looking at the shapes seen in minerals. They are made of geometric shapes due to the chemical make-up of the mineral. We used this knowledge and a ruler as a straight edge to draw an angular shape. Then we drew lines inward from each point along the edge to break the shape up into triangles and other polygons. I really emphasized holding the ruler still while drawing so that all of their lines were nice and straight. We finished off the day by picking one color and painting about a third of the shapes in our mineral with it.

For the second day, we talked about value and how it can be used to create form. The students had already unknowingly used form on their chalk drawings of Jeff Koons' balloon dog. I introduced them to tints and shades and talked about how tints are lighter and look like light is hitting the mineral. Shades are darker and look like they are shadows on the mineral. We practiced mixing tints this class and placed them onto a value scale, showing a range of tints. I collected all of these strips of value scales and am in the process of putting them together into a big collaborative project. After finishing their practice value scale, they mixed tints and added them to their mineral. You can bet that we used sparkle paint to add a bit of shine to our minerals!

For the third day, they did the same as the second, except they worked with shades this time. Students finished painting on this day.

The last day, we cut out our mineral and glued chunks of cardboard to the back of it before gluing it onto a black background. Because the students didn't have much to do this day, I introduced them to the installation artist, Olafur Eliasson. While the students will not be directly making a project about Olafur, their collaborative project made from all the value scales will be based on one of his works.

Recently, my 3rd graders over at Consolidated had the chance to Mystery Skype with another art class. We Skype'd with my art teachin' friend Tasha Newton who teaches K-6 in Fall Creek, WI. You can check out her blog at: http://iartmyjob.weebly.com/

When we Skype'd with them, a couple of my students introduced our school to them with a couple paragraphs that we wrote together. Then we played a live version of "Guess Who" except instead of trying to guess a person, we tried to guess what art medium they were thinking of. This challenged the kids to start with broad questions and work their way down to more specific questions. It was a great chance for our students to practice thinking on their feet! After we played a couple rounds with them, then we played a quick drawing game with them as well.

It was a blast and we can't wait to Skype with them again!

To go along with the NCAA March Madness Tourney, we had a little tournament of our own in art class. I selected 10 Pop Artists (a few who my 3rd graders had already learned about) and placed them into a bracket. Each class did their own voting to determine who they thought the King of Pop was. I was nervous about doing it at first because we wouldn't be doing any art-making during the two days it took us to do the tourney. To my surprise, the kids didn't see to mind that we were taking a couple days off from making art. For each round, I showed a selection of the artists' work up on the screen. Students voted for which artist they liked better and then we read off votes. There were some super close match-ups that really got the kids excited. After each round, I asked the kids why they chose the artist that they did over the opposing artist. I was blown away when I had nearly every kid wanting to talk about their choice. It was awesome hearing the kids explain their rationale! All in all, Jeff Koons won in 2 of the classes and Claes Oldenburg (who was beat out by Koons in the finals in the other two classes) won in 1 class.