After I read Harold and the Purple Crayon to 3rd graders, they investigated the themes of the book of imagination, invention and how humans create the world we inhabit. Using watercolor after applying a white crayon, the kids invented images of things they wanted to see in the world.
surrealism, Mythology & games!Combining the Surrealists use of chance and the dream-like nature of mythology in a game unit seemed like a natural way to motivate and intrigue students in 3rd-7th grade. They watched videos on Greek and Native American Mythology as well as the Surrealists. They then made a gameboard in Google Slides with three categories: heads, torsos/arms and lowerbody/legs. I let them choose any human or animal image to place in these, then they rolled a die to create sketches and make a final drawing with shading, or a monster out of clay.
In 3rd through 5th grades, students learned facts about global warming, watched a video on Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson’s, Arctic Ice in Paris, did a warm up drawing icebergs on the computer and made a faux stained glass tree installation in the cafeteria. They also created endangered animal and insect paintings and drawings to highlight extinction issues after watching Lucienne Rickard’s Extinction Studies project in Tasmania where she drew extinct animals for over a year and then erased them in a poignant performance. Older kids in middle school also made a mixed media project where they researched a bird on the Audubon website and added a creative song of choice.
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Students researched an endangered animal or insect and made a drawing or painting about that creature, using emphasis as an Element of Art. For the insects, they had the choice of using symmetry (after watching a video and linking it to their math projects) and folding it to make a surprise painting with tempera.
The kids in grades 3-7 first started by researching a bird on the Audubon website and answering some questions and adding a picture to their Google Doc. Then they cut out and layered their bird using construction paper. In the background, they then added the habitat in that they researched and chose a song lyric to match their bird’s personality and habits.
In grades, 3-5th in spring 2021, the kids played a few art games to get acclimated to school after being in distance learning so long. I had them play an art observation game where I chose a few Black artists like Alma Thomas and Virginia Chihota as well as Asian American artist, Yayoi Kusama, in order to have one person on each team describe the painting and the rest of the team try to paint what they hear. They competed against each other for points and had fun.
This activity is based on Oliver Herring’s Task art project which involves audience in a form of social practice art. Instead of performance art where the artist is the main focus and actor, Herring includes people as his raw materials, where they generate ideas for his work in the form of art parties where people are asked to make a task for others to do and carry out.
I asked the kids to make up drawing prompts for each other to do such as: draw a house that changes into something else, draw yourself performing on a stage and draw a loving wolf. This student-centered art project really involves the kids in creative ideas! They love it.
Many of the students in my intro classes hadn’t had any art in middle school, so they were sometimes functioning at a 5th grade level in terms of their drawing ability. In order to meet them where they were, I had them do a drawing bootcamp to get their engines running again.
Picasso’s drawing of Igor Stravinsky: a classic staple of art education.
Student example
Students chose an object and experimented with mark making using scribble lines, lines in one direction, lines in all directions, zig zag and another using all of them.
In this unit, kids could make any vessel they wanted but it had to have some kind of attachment. They learned about the stages of clay and hand-building techniques. After that, students started doing research on five artists working in any medium using websites such as the Getty, Met and the Art Institute of Chicago. I had them parse out what they found compelling about each artist in order to translate it into their own clay projects. Then they developed prototypes using a choice of coil, slab and pinch pot methods. Some focused on color, abstraction and others on a theme or concept.
Jake experimented with using a balloon and slab building over the shape. He was working with how to combine nature and emotions.
He made objects that he felt an emotional attachment to and placed them inside the basketball sphere.
Quite a few kids in my intro classes haven’t made art for a while, including playing with watercolors. I asked them to create landscapes from a photo they took or an image off the Internet that wasn’t already a watercolor. We talked about color theory and I had them choose a Color Contrast (warm, cool; light dark; saturation of hue) so they could structure their painting a bit more and try to work with understanding how colors work in space.
First, they did a watercolor techniques grid in order to get a feel for the variety that watercolor can bring as well as play with brushstroke. Then they made some sketches in watercolor and pencil. I showed them slides on watercolor artists in art history and made demo videos showing both realistic and abstract options to choose from.
In this unit, students researched a mythological creature, read about Surrealism, watched a video on how people use myths and then played a game with an online dice roll to determine the head, torso/arms and lower body and legs of their creature. I asked them to mix human and animal parts since myths are often made of both. They put images from the Internet into slides and then rolled the die. They made sketches and then created a final image with shading.
Grace’s example of the game slides!
Grace really explored her character!
Adrian mixed in cartoon characters.
Adrian’s finished sketch with shading.
Student played a variation of the Snowball Game which is crumpling up paper after writing on it and throwing it across the room. Then they chose a random paper and drew what was listed on it. I showed them Oliver Herring’s TASK video to talk about Social Practice as a new art form and how that involves the audience as raw material for the actual art and process. He holds large art gatherings and in this example, he has people write a task for someone else and put it in a box. Another person draws an example from the box and does what it says.
I adapted this for distance learning by making Google Slides where each student could add in three facts about themselves as a get to know you activity and then write a drawing prompt for another student, who would then draw it.
This student’s prompt was to draw a Conga Line.
This task was to draw an imaginary creature.
This one goes with the prompt below that asks the other person to draw emotions on a sad day.
At the beginning of the trimester in fall 2020, I had the students do a couple of get to know you activities to build community in my classes. They also learned that collaboration was a way for artists to generate ideas for artwork.
Art hospital is an activity where one person starts with drawing “mistakes” using ink, charcoal, chalk, markers or pencil. The second person tries to add more mistakes and send it back to the first person to decide how to resolve the work. There are variations on this. I showed them a video on John Baldassari, a conceptual artist, and how he used mistakes in his work, such as in his photo series where he breaks the rules of photography.
The second lesson was about pet peeves. I had them pay the game “Me Too” and come up with pet peeves that way. Then they had a lot of pet peeves to work from and chose one to draw. It could have been theirs or someone else’s idea.
This student really didn’t like wearing his mask during COVID.
This one was about talking really loudly.
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