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.

Illuminating

Hello, my name is Remiss.  I have not posted here for weeks.  Now I am trying to edit four sets of pictures and finish up posts from this school year - all by the end of this week.  Wowee....

The last few art lessons of the year all rotated around letters and names.  I had meant to do an ambitious lesson set on the Florida Highwaymen, but did not feel ready to do those artists justice, and kept pushing the lessons back...another...week.  Finally I conceded that the Highwaymen must wait for next year. 

We had fun illuminating letters though, alienating names, and putting words into boxes.

Most of the Sm'Arties have already studied the Middle Ages and seen examples of illuminated letters, but time has gone by, the students are older, their art skills are more developed, and it was a great time to look back a few centuries to the time when every book was a work of art.

I showed the Sm'Arties samples of illuminated letters, gave them squares of cream-colored cardstock, and let them create.

Their themes and interpretations surprised me!

When they were done, I mounted the squares on slightly larger squares of dark leathery-look scrapbook paper for a bit more of a finished look.

Warm Hand

Warm hand, project borrowed from Art Projects for Kids.  (See what Oodles of Art did with this idea.)







This week we finished up our Color Wheel handouts,

...traced our own hands on the striped pages PE Mom did during Writing (prep work on the pages really helps move the  process along - we used ovals and L-shapes),

 

...got out our colored pencils, sorting them into warm colors and cool colors,

...and did art.

Good quality colored pencils are so nice for working.  My favorites at the moment are Crayola Twistables, and I love the Vibrant Variety set.  They are soft and blendable, and no sharpening is needed. (Today we were all using regular wood colored pencils. By the end of this project, the pencil sharperner was in constant demand.) I use Twistables as Highlighters sometimes, they are so smooth and nice.