Jumping in Full Swing!

We're off to a running start this year! Our curriculum for the year is Art Through the Ages and every grade level has begun with the beginning. The Ancient World! As we finish projects I'll post individual blogs about each but for an overview here's where we're at!

5th Grade is working on Egyptian Landscapes and learning about the pyramids while practicing blending/gradation, silhouettes and aerial perspective to show depth!

4th Grade & 2nd Grade are focused on Lascaux Cave in Paris, where cave paintings from 18,000 years ago were discovered by a group kids walking their dog. Some of these cave drawings are over 3x the height of Mrs Fisher! WHOA! 4th is learning to add texture and some alternate ways to use some of our long loved materials, using water to make the markers bleed and then adding some color mixing with our liquid watercolors to create a wet on wet technique. 2nd had some texture focus with crumpling then combined the strong line of oil pastels to the soft blending of chalk pastels. We're learning the importance of adding our lightest value first as well as how we can focus on certain areas to create shadow and emphasis!

3rd Grade is looking at Chumash Rock Art and delving into a multiple step project that involves a variety of media and techniques for an overall bright and beautiful composition. We are focusing a lot on balancing our composition by spreading out the weight of our symbols and collaging.

1st Grade is making Wooley Mammoths to start up the year! We began day 1 with a guided drawing (I draw a line, they draw the line, step by step together). We created our Mammoths using oil pastel and then added "horizon lines," an iceberg and some white snow and stars that were unveiled on day 2 when we painted our backgrounds using tempera cakes! We tried to use a variety of techniques for the different areas of our background - wet on wet for a swirly sky, smooth painting of our icebergs and a dry brush technique for our icy ground. Next up is our textured fur to complete the project!

Kindergarten began the year with an intro to the Art Room and portfolio creating and then we've jumped into the start of Easter Island heads! We've drawn our contour lines and crumpled our paper to make our stony texture, next up we'll learn all about the element of line while creating our backgrounds!