Op Art Contour Hands

Sm'Arties had fun with  this lesson found on Artsonia, inspired by artist Bridget Riley.

I think most children enjoy optical illusions. These lines flow over the hands, creating the optical illusion of fluid encountering and flowing over a hand.

50 Trees

In keeping with our Science interest in Botany this year, our art lessons are often inspired by plants.  At this meeting of the Sm'Arties, we drew trees!   



Our trees were not scientific botanical drawings, but fun, stylized, realistic, abstract, themed...just a page full of TREES.

I put out skinny Sharpies and Flair pens. I found it interesting that the 2 girls jumped right in with ink, but all the boys chose to use pencils.  We looked at some printouts of  trees for a little inspiration/copycatting.  Thanks for the inspiration, artists Susan Wolsborn and Eloise Renouf! We love your trees!

She of the 50 cats with creative names also names all her trees: 

It's no surprise that Charlie Brown's tree made an appearance.

Along with a forest of great variety.

...and the next week they brought their assigned homework - draw more trees!

Faces

This project comes from Art Projects for kids' Chuck Close Portraits.

Earlier in the fall, I took head-and-shoulder snapshots of each Sm'Artie.  At home, I loaded the pictures onto picnik.com and edited them to give a black-and-white pencil sketch effect. 

We traced the portraits onto graph paper, and then colored the squares. 

The rules: no realistic colors (hair can be green and purple; it cannot be brown), use 2 consistent colors on each big section.