October in the Irving School Art Room

This past Friday, I was able to spend some time putting up some of the students' fantastic artwork. The fifth graders completed their self-portrait projects in the style of Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein. We looked at and discussed some of his work and then they created their portraits in a simple cartoon style using a limited color palette of the primary colors (red, blue and yellow), plus black and white. Their drawings (done in colored marker) also had to show Lichtenstein features like Benday dots and thought bubbles with an adjective that described a positive aspect of their personality. The results are unique and very fun! Come check out the display in the hallways now. Students who finished their self-portraits were then able to glaze their terracotta Aztec-inspired suns that we started at the beginning of the school year. I hope to get those into the front hallway display cabinet some time this week.

The fourth grade students also did self-portraits, this time inspired by the Fauves, a group of French artists known as "Wild Beasts" for their ground-breaking use of bright, unrealistic colors. The students created their self-portraits using brightly colored paper to make a collage.

For the third grade self-portraits, students studied the prints of another Pop Artist: Andy Warhol. We talked about the tenets of Pop Art and a little bit about Andy's life. Then students drew their pictures on styrofoam with pens. During the next class, they used brayers to apply block printing inks to the styrofoam printing plate and created prints in various colors. Finally, the images were trimmed and arranged to show multiples on one piece of paper. Each one is so different!

Second grade students practiced mixing colors of tempera paint to create a traditional autumn still-life featuring apples in a bowl. Some students added other fruits as well using cut papers for a collage, or chose to add a decorative border of painted paper.

First graders analyzed the jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau and talked about things we might see in a jungle. Together we drew a big tiger, cut it out, glued it to a new sheet of background paper, and then used crayons and paper scraps to add the jungle elements. So adorable!

And kindergarten students looked at videos of different types of red crabs, drew their own with oil pastels and painted an ocean scene with watercolors. The last step is to add some dimensional texture with a variety of dried beans.