Nazareth Center for the Arts

Our July lessons ended today. It was a great month! I had a new group of students and we did a drawing intensive month. We learned different techniques to improve drawing skills and to improve how we see. 

Here are images from our July month of lessons...

Drawing horizontal and vertical lines to practice accuracy.

Drawing circles to improve control.

Practicing the elusive elipse 

Cylinders

Putting cylinders and bowls together to make a bottle

Mug and shading 

Organizing objects by value (black to white) 

Shading

We ended the month by creating a fun monochromatic painting!

1st Grade Future Me Self Portraits

This is a fun self portait lesson for younger students. We studied famous self portraits and talked about what makes a self portrait successful (face is large for detail and emphasis, background is basic so it's not distracting, there are visual clues to show what is important about that person). They I asked students to create a self portrait of their dream career when they grow up. There was such a great variety of career choices and everyone enjoyed drawing themselves as successful, happy grown ups.

^^ yay a future art teacher conducting the van Gogh sunflower lesson from earlier this year!

^^ an artist, with a mustache of course

^^ caring for animals (like a vet)

^^ future major league baseball player

^^ the quietest student wants to be a police officer to help people (and because donuts are yummy!)

^^ a train conductor!

^^ and a judge referring to the bill of rights to make his decision

As always, their stories behind the pictures make my day!

4th grade Woven Owl

We took the tradition of cardboard weaving and used it to create adorable owls! Most of the 4th grade students learned to love weaving after they got into the flow of it.

8th Grade Tin Foil Project

The 8th graders completed a fun project at the end of the year. While groups were working on the mural, other students were working on their foil projects. To begin, students glued yarn to a piece of cardboard, they created what ever (approved) image they wanted. Then, they smoothed foil other the yarn so that you could see the design by the peaks and valleys. They finished the project by coloring with Sharpies.

^^ such great detail from the yarn!

1st Grade Van Gogh Sunflower Watercolor Resist

This project created some beautiful work, I was happy to see so many parents proud of their little artists. This project is obviously inspired by Vincent van Gogh's sunflower series. We looked at many images from van Gogh's sunflower series and discussed color schemes. It's amazing how observant children can be. This lesson had a mixture of following step by step insturctions and also personal choices. Do you get a sense of their different personalities?

Preschool Last Day Fun Painting

For the last day of 2015/2016 preschool Art I broke out the paints and let the students be completely creative. Each student got his/her own palette of colors and a fresh sheet of paper. One of my favorite parts of my job is seeing what they want to create, and watching them light up as they tell me about their artwork.

^^ the "dots" in the top painting are bird tracks. The student said their is a peacock who lives in her neighborhood and his feet leave tracks all over the mud.

4th grade Crayola Grant Project

This year (2015/2016) Mrs. Hynes and I teamed up to write a grand for a Crayola Grant Project and .. we were awarded the grant!

Mrs. Bruce came to us with the idea to update our existing Food Pyramid mural. The government has recently changed the pyramid to what they call MyPlate , a round "plate design" that shows how much of each food group to fill your plate with. The project was completed with 4th grade, it's become a bit of a tradition to design the grant for 4th grade.

Mrs. Hynes handled the nutrition education in Health and P.E. and then we created the mural in Art class. We recycled the existing mural by using the back side of the wood (yay recycling!). I had the students involved in every aspect of the design. They helped me measure the board and use Math skills to figure out how to enlarge the 8x10" image of MyPlate onto our board that was 3.5 times that size. They also helped to draw out the rough design perfectly placed on the board using rulers, compasses and a few creative uses of yarn and an upturned stool. It was important to me that the students saw how much work goes into creating a successful mural so that when it came time to depict the food they would really want to to do their best work.

The 4th grade students were broken into groups randomly so there would be at least one group responisble for each food group. Then, they discussed and made a list of health food options for their group (i.e. vegetables) and each person decided which item from the list they wanted to draw. Each child created a drawing and then used acrylic paints to create one piece of food for the board. Yes, all of the food you see here was painted by 4th grade students!!!

I painted the extra "ingredients for a healthy life"; fitness, education and religion.

We used a few coats of acrylic medium to seal the work and help preserve it for years to come!

I can't wait to share an image of the finished product hanging on the wall!