Alienated Names

I am not sure where I first spied this fun lesson.  Maybe it came from Kinderart.  It's so much fun, and the students love the results so much that many art teachers have "alienated" their students :)

How to:  Fold paper in half length-wise.  Using the fold as the bottom line, write your name, your friend's name, or your Alias in GREAT BIG cursive letters in Sharpie or marker. Getting the writing BIG ENOUGH is the hardest part.

The original instructions I read suggested you not add any letter tails (g, y, etc.), but sometimes adding the opposing tails gives some cool results.

Trace the name so that it is mirror image to the first name. If the paper is thin enough and the writing dark enough, you can trace through, but if necessary, you can refold the paper the opposite way, trace name # 2 on the backside, then unfold and trace on the front.  Turn you paper upright and...ta-da!  An alien appears.

Trace him/her in Sharpie or dark marker, find his features, and embellish and color away!  Scare you friends!  Or make them laugh!

Spooky:  Here is another take on this lesson from Kid's Artists.

Squaring off

When I rediscover where I first saw this little project, I will insert a link - credit where credit is due!

Many folds!  We need 8 triangles showing.

Writing the words to fill up the space.  This means the middle letters are the largest letters in the word.

Write each word 8 times.  If you are brave, you can use Sharpies right from the start.

Almost done - smooth it out.

And color!  We like the Multicultural packs of markers, crayons and colored pencils - all those browns!

But frogs like bright colors :)

Mondrian style

Update:  I am embarrassed to realize I skipped a link - credit where credit is due!  This project is very much inspired from this project at Art Projects For Kids, one of my very favorite websites.

 

This project was inspired by art by Piet Mondrian, a 20th century Dutch artist who, in his latter years painted many pictures with names like Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red.  This worked in nicely with a 2-part lesson on the color wheel.  I used Donna Young's printables of the color wheel, with some fill-in-the-blanks I typed up for the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors.  Next week we plan to continue with Complimentary and Analogous colors, and warm and cool colors. I found out that I don't know how to spell "analogous."  I want to spell "analygous."

We used rulers and pencils to line off about 3 lines each way on white cardstock; then erased some of the lines to make interesting rectangles.  These were re-lined using mostly black Sharpies (all our black student markers were sort of grayish).  A few rectangles were then colored in using markers in just the primary colors - red, blue, and yellow.