Happy Valentine's Day!Exploring the Work of Jim Dine!

My 1st grade students were introduced to the Pop Art of artist Jim Dine and his heart series. We discussed how his hearts look different than those seen on a Valentine's Day Card in addition to what Pop Art is and collage. Students first traced a heart pattern on white paper using charcoal. We then ripped up the pieces and glued them onto a large 9X12"inch white paper. We then used tempera paint to paint the background space in between. They then cut out a large heart from pink construction paper and glued it onto the final dry collage work.

 They explored their own paint mixing and painting skills by painting only the heart and finished it off with a black outline. I think these turned out awesome and I just loved the results! As a final assessment students hung up their pieces on the front boards and we had a small critique discussing things they discovered, what they did not understand and what they liked and did not like about the lesson.

Global and Social Issues Comics

I started this lesson my first year of teaching with my 6th grade students. I know creating comics can always be cliche and have the idea that only super hero's are in comics and comic books. So I took a different approach on the comic strip and had my 6th grade students do research on a social or global issue as their main comic strip topic. They loved learning about new topics and they had a blast creating their ideas. This was a good start to get them thinking and they created webs to write down their story lines and characters. These were my results 5 years ago. Today with my 6th grade students I started my comic lesson again and we are going to add a digital twist to it in our Art and Technology Class. Below are a couple of great websites you might find helpful and interesting to use in your classrooms! I can't wait to post the final results.

20 Ways to Use Comics in the Classroom

Also check out The Hero Machine!
 http://www.heromachine.com/heromachine-2-5-character-portrait-creator/

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/10/20-ways-to-use-comics-in-your-classroom.html

Comic and Story Creator

http://myths.e2bn.org/story_creator/

Comic Creator

http://boyslife.org/games/online-games/235/comic-creator/

Create a Graphic Novel

http://www.comicmaster.org.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/comicmaker/create/

Pixton

http://www.pixton.com/

ToonDoo
http://www.toondoo.com/

I created an ETSY Account!!

So as an art educator, we put a lot of our time, hard work, and creativity into the lessons and environment in which we teach. We loose track of our own creative outlets, and sometimes creating our own artwork can be put on the back burner! After teacher for 5 years now, I have limited my painting and creativity time for myself.

This past month I took advantage of creating my own art work and decided to get back into the art making world and start expressing my voice again! Check out the work I posted on ETSY. Make sure you don't forget that you too are an artist and you need to make time for your creative voice as well!
My Etsy Shop! Seraphic Arts

Upcycled garage door window frames!

Our great Math facilitator and teacher who retired last year still brings me goodies into the art room! I LOVE to recycle and I am always looking for the junk to make it into something funky, cool, and unique!! These now gold frames with jewels were gray plastic window frames from the retired teachers garage door. They had holes in them from the screws and were dusty and yucky! I spray painted them gold and hot glued some fun gems around the edges where the screw holes were. Check them out!

Upcycled Picasso Portraits

One of my wonderful students parents works at a factory where they had an over abundance of this shipping foam that was going to be thrown out! OH NO! The art teacher could use that! My students and I used it to create our cubist Picasso portraits. They are turning out awesome and they are a perfect way to incorporate that cubist style. Check out the progress. I will have finished results in the next couple of days

Becoming the Author and Illustrator! Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems

I LOVE BOOKS! I love working with my fantastic librarian because she has the most amazing selection of books I can use as resources with my students. I also have a collection of books that I took out from the Library that I keep in my classroom for students to look at during their free time in my reading center! If you are not familar with Mo Willems, then you should check out his work. I love introducing new art techniques and processes with my students through the use of the work illustratos have done for amazing children's books. They make a great connection with it and they also can not wait to get to the library to check the book out when we are finished discussing and reading it for our lesson!

My 2nd grad students have a storytelling unit that I do with them every year. What I did is I went around my community and took photographs of familiar places that students have gone to or seen in our community. I also took some photographs from magazines and photo copied them. We used this as the backgrounds for out stories. Students had to draw their own characters and cut them out. I made copies of their characters to save the time of cutting and drawing. We discussed Willems style and used a similar technique in our books with the black and white backgrounds and colorful characters. I then had the books bound so they could take them home. They shared the stories with some of the kindergarten students. This was a great lesson and the students LOVED become authors and illustrators of their own work.

Oh so Cool Coral!

2nd Grade students explored and reviewed the use of cool colors. We did observational drawings from photographs of crabs and discussed the environment crabs live in and what their homes look like. We also got into talking about some other great sea creatures! The students created textured coral bases out of clay and then created painted coral paper which was laminated and hot glued into the clay coral piece. The students then used watercolor and sharpie to create their crabs and cut them out to display this cool colored 3-D piece of art!