What Would Make You Roar? 1st Grade Oil Pastel Lions Talk

Oil Pastels, Music, and iPads make for a very fun art project!

This project was inspired by Susan Tiedemann from Brunswick Acres School in New Jersey.  Thanks for your inspiration!

1st grade students were learning about the difference between geometric and organic shapes. We discussed where on a lion's face could we use both types of shapes then student began to draw their lions with oil pastels.

We even enjoyed listening to Katy Perry's "Roar" while we worked. That made it even better!

When our lions were finished we were not quite done. We talked about what would make us roar. Would we roar when we were feeing happy, sad, mad, silly?

Using the iPad app Morfo students were able to bring their lions to life.














I combined each child's lion into a class video using the iMovie app. Here's the finished work -

2nd Grade Oil Pastels & Watercolor Birch Trees

I loved the beautiful results from this project! 

The students and I discussed the lines we saw in images of Birch trees. They compared the texture and color of Birch tree bark with that of other trees.

The project started by drawing the birch tree trunks using black oil pastel. We talked about the use of overlapping to make some trees look like they were behind others. They colored in the trees with white oil pastel letting the black and white blend a bit into grey.

We had a discussion about how an artist can add interest and uniqueness to their artwork by changing things from how they look in "real life." I introduced the term "Artistic License" to them and told them they each had one to be creative with. I encouraged them to add other colors into the bark of their birch trees if they wish to do so. Many used different colors of oil pastels to blend into the white and black of their trees.

The last step in the project was to use primary colors of watercolor to paint in the background. We were reviewing how the primary colors mix to make secondary colors, so I encouraged them to mix them together as much as they wanted to.








This is one of my favorites! See more student works in our Artsonia gallery - http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?exhibit=561263

O'Keeffe Inspired Close Ups

Fourth grade students were my target for these interesting oil pastel drawings 
(Though 2 of the classes were 4th/5th and 3rd/4th splits - the majority were 4th graders)

A class period was spent giving students some background information on Georgia O'Keeffe. She is one of my favorites and I was pleasantly surprised at the student's attentiveness and interest in learning about her. I have a wonderful book that is great for these upper-elementary students - My Name Is Georgia by Jeanette Winter.  I also have put together clips onto a dvd from an old video I have with pictures of her works. The students love seeing her on the video and listening to her talk about her life and art. I allow students to comment and discuss and ideas about her works as we look at them. I concentrated on putting many of her close-up views in the dvd because that is what we were going to focus on.

The last 10 minutes or so of class I explain the project to the students. I showed them magazine pictures that I had collected of animals and plants. I also show students viewfinders that were cut from index cards.  We discussed how we were going to take an image and blow it up to a larger size. They would only be drawing what was inside of their viewfinder.  If time remained I plopped a pile of magazine pics on each table and allowed students to choose their image and play around with the viewfinders to find interesting areas of the picture.

                                       

The next class students decided exactly where they were going to place their viewfinder and taped it down to the magazine paper. I gave students a quick demo on how to start to enlarge the image onto their papers (which were about 12x15). I showed them how to mark their viewfinder and paper off into quarters (not quite a whole grid method - just a simplified start of one) and use these guide marks to see where lines and shapes should be placed on the paper.

See More of these on the Roosevelt Artsonia Site.

It took most students 2-3 classes to draw out and use the oil pastels to complete the works. I'm very pleased at how these turned out. I do have one more added part to this project that will involve writing and an iPad app -but I'll save that for another blog post!