Artist Focus: Wayne Thiebaud

"If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective." 
~Wayne Thiebaud (Tee-Bo)

I am so excited to show off the students work this week. We learned about the Impasto techniques that Wayne Thiebaud used to create his realistic pie paintings. Impasto is the technique of applying large quantities of paint with a brush or palette knife, usually with a very gestural quality. The effect is a three-dimensional aspect to the surface. Get ready to have your appetites enticed!

The younger students saw this assignment and wanted to 
paint pies too! Here are their paintings. Wow!

Great work! Now...I'm going to go have dessert!

Tesselations

Studying M.C. Escher and his geometric Tessellation's. 

This was harder than it looks! 

In short, a tessellation is any repeating pattern of interlocking shapes. Tessellations are also sometimes known as tilings, but the word "tilings" usually refers to patterns of polygons (shapes with straight boundaries). The definition sounds fairly simple, but the ideas involved in designing and understanding tessellations can grow very complex and interesting.

Artist Focus: Ron Krajewski

Ron Krajewski 

is a contemporary artist that specializes in pet portrait paintings. 

It was fun to look at his paintings and see the wimzy he puts into his art. 

We used water colors and tried to emulate his carefree and colorful style. 

Idioms

Today we talked about humor in art and created Idiom Paintings. 

We spent some time brainstorming ideas and created "thumbnails" (which are small sketches on paper to help jot down creative ideas as well as a simple fast way to work out composition) 

Here are a few of the Idioms we came up with in class:

On a wing and a prayer

Happy as a clam

On the straight and narrow

Birds of a feather stick together

All that glitters is not gold

Put your best foot forward

Can you think of some?? 

Here are some of the students Idiom paintings 

~

Water Color Trees

Today we played with water color paints and salt. It was fascinating to watch the salt absorb the water in the paintings. We learned different techniques for creating texture. 

Painted Cupcakes

I got this idea from this little painted cupcake at Hobby Lobby. I thought...my class would love this!
And they did!!

I made cut out forms for each student with a cupcake bottom and 2 tops (one with the cherry). They were all seperate pieces. I also had a bottle lid they could trace for the background poka dots. The students were told they could create a cupcake as BIG as they wanted...as many layers and flavors as they could stand. But...the big question was...Could they get their mouths over them?? ~! After their paintings dried they traced around the edges with black marker. So cute!!

Teacher samples...

Artist Focus: Eric Carle

We took pieces of typing paper and did big swashes of color. Then we took old credit cards and cut notches in the edges so we could 'comb' over the wet paint and create designs. Then we cut out our collage butterflies using all the different vibrant pages of colors. The results were fantastic. We may have to do this again! We had a blast! (If we do it again I will have them paint the backgrounds too!) Enjoy this new technique and try some at home. Post some of your own!!