Graphite Portraits

For our final drawing project, we decided to get down to business! People are easily one of the hardest subjects to draw because if you are just a little off, it won't look right. That being said, my students BLEW ME OUT OF THE WATER with what they accomplished. We began the lesson by having everyone draw a portrait with no instruction and then I showed them the most commonly made mistakes when drawing the face. We then went through the rights and wrongs of drawing lips, eyes, noses, and hair.

After demonstrating how to sketch and measure the dimensions of the face, the students were off! Each with a picture of a celebrity, they patiently drew for the remaining weeks of school.

     

Talitha Call, grade 7, drew Lindsey Stirling. Teeth are hard and she nailed it!

 

Rebecca Ross, Grade 6, drew Taylor Swift.

Larisa Kozhevnikova, Grade 10, drew a Russian celeb whose name now escapes me...

Vincent Baird, Grade 7, drew Tim Tebow.

Amariah Adams, Grade 9, drew Jennifer Lawrence. The Charcoal was an excellent touch to made this portrait really pop!

Julia Fox, Grade 8, drew Emma Stone. They actually look very much alike and she did wonderful!

As a teacher, I am tremendously proud of how well everyone did and of all that we accomplished this year! I'm going to miss my amazing artists!

Monochromatic Value Portraits

As we work through the elements of art in my high school classes, we have finally arrived at value! Using the grid method that we all know and love, the students drew a line drawing identifying the light, medium, and dark values in their school photo. Then, choosing one color they created a series of tints and shades to paint their final portrait. Nothing like a little pop-art inspired art to get you in the mood for art!

 

O'keefe Flowers

I cannot help my shout from the rooftops about how much I LOVED all of these value projects inspired by the beautiful paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. Every student nailed it, and created stunning art while mastering the identification of light, dark and medium values. 

The K-1 classes created 3-d tissue paper poppies, inspired by O'Keefe's painting entitled "Oriental Poppies."

Our youngest students followed close directions, and cut clean and precise lines, with an end result of these gorgeous flowers!

Ancel and Ruth know how to get things done!

So many poppies!

 These were beautiful, and produced such a wonderful response from our kiddo's that I wanted to give a basic tutorial on how these can be done at home!

All you need is some tissue paper, a few coffee filters, scissors, glue, and VIOLA! First, glue 2-3 coffee filters on a piece of paper. This gives the flower it's gravity defying volume.

Next, we took 2 sheets of tissue paper (about 8inX8in) and folded it into quarters. Then, with the open edges facing away from the body, we cut a rounded edge. Once unfolded, this became our first layer of petals. We did this process again with another color of tissue paper and added 2 more layers!

Finally, we took some small square pieces of black tissue paper and after placing the eraser of a pencil in the center, wrapped the edges up around the pencil, and after putting glue on the end, pressed them into the center of our flower.

We went with the same poppy inspiration for grades 2-3, but with a different approach.

We created sunlight catchers with tissue paper and glue. 

It's going to be hard to take these down!

Finally, our 4th and 5th graders used chalk pastels to flawlessly blend values together in these close-up flower drawings. Glue mixed with india ink was used to paint these sleek black outlines.

Trinity, Alex, and Damian became blending masters in mere minutes!

And I love the cool colors used by Waylon and Nick!

Mayra is always accompanied by a positive attitude in Art!

Are these amazing, or are these amazing? I am totally not biased. Maybe it's the winter, but this splash of color was just what we needed! 

 This month is SVLA's turn to decorate at the district office, and I don't think I will be able to help but show these off! Great work SVLA elementary students!

Value Winter Scenes

Value is defined as the lightness or darkness of  a color. To really grasp this idea, our younger grades did a monochromatic scene by mixing white or black to a pure hue.

The K-1 class embraced 5 different values of blue by mixing colors and using smooth long strokes across their papers.

Second and third graders spread their gradient in more steps across their paper, adding a black tree to contrast the bright snow.

 Such a great, full tree, Hyrum!

 I love the movement of this tree Summer created!

Finally, we experimented with some shading that creates a 3-dimensional appearance.

The 4th and 5th graders blew me away with their snowmen.

 I'm so excited to see what else our students can do with value in the future!