MARCH in the Studio

Miniature Still Life Montage

ACRYLIC MINIATURES: Painting a vase of flowers? Easy. Painting a 4"x4"vase of flowers? Hmm...but that's exactly what we did. Each older elementary student created a still life in acrylics, using the tiniest of brushes and a pretty small canvas. We tried to indicate form and show our brushwork. 

ART WORDS: Acrylic, canvas. gallery wrap, miniature, form

Mondrian Collage - Emma - Age 6

PRIMARY COLLAGE with Piet Mondrian: Meanwhile, the PreK - 1st Grade classes responed by making some very flat artwork. We talked about Piet Mondrian's style and how it evolved, then used construction paper, scissors, glue,paint and cardboard for printing bold lines.

ART WORDS: Primary colors, square, rectangle

ASSEMBLAGES with Louise Nevelson: The Art Explorers love to glue! They were presented with a table full of found objects like bottle caps and popsicle sticks and a bottle of glue and that was fun. Then it was suggested they could squeeze all the glue out if they wanted. After a split-second's hesitation it got way funner. The end results were spray painted black to resemble Nevelson's work

Process art at it's best!

"BLUE" DOGS with George Roderigue: Louisiana artist George Roderigue made quite an impression on the elementary age artists with his iconic Blue Dog. They loved hearing how Blue Dog was born from the Cajun legend of the loup garou. We used templates of Roderigue's Blue Dog to plan out our own versions, which could be any or all colors.

ART WORDS: Motif

Planning our "Blue" Dogs.

PAINTED PAPER COLLAGES with Eric Carle: Everybody loves The Very Hungry Caterpillar, right? So the Art Explorers and PreK celebrated Very Hungry Caterpillar Day (March 20) by making painted paper collages in they style of author Eric Carle. Flowers, caterpillars, butterflies, ladybugs and a chrysalis were all created!
ART WORDS: Author, illustrator, collage

Watercolor Technique Seascape - Emma - Age 4

WATERCOLOR MAGIC SEASCAPES: The PreK artists experimented with watercolor and salt to make some lovely seascapes. When salt is sprinkled on wet watercolor, it soaks up the pigment and makes a wonderful, crystalline effect. Once dry, our painted paper was ripped and glued down to resemble the surf at the beach.

ART WORDS: Seascape, horizon line

Discussing a video on Faberge eggs.

 FABERGE EGGS: All age-levels learned about Russian court jeweler Peter Carl Faberge and his marvelous, jewel-encrusted eggs. They especially loved the story of how the egg tradition began as an Easter gift from the Czar to the Czarina. We made our own versions of the eggs and hid something inside for our families to find on Easter!

How We Spent Our Summer Vacation - A is for Abstract

A starts Abstract, Art and August, so what better way to start the last month of summer than to learn about non-representational art?

After learning the difference between figural and abstract art, we created a little of both. When parents arrived they were challenged to tell what they saw in our abstract paintings. Of course, nobody saw the same thing.

Tuesday was Circle Day. We concentrated on that shape by making our own versions of Rachel Whiteread's 2012 Olympic poster design.

This was a great tie-in because the Olympics were ongoing at the time!

And you can't have Circle Day without a little Kandinsky!

Action Painting Day! You know we flung some paint...

...and got VERY messy...

...but the results were well worth it.


After painting our individual masterpieces, we each mixed our own color of chalk paint and did a collaborative action painting in the parking lot.

(Please try to ignore the tire marks. Nothing lasts forever, and alas, our art barely lasted an hour!)

Throughout the week we enjoyed A is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet by Stephen T Johnson. It was especially fun finding the letters in each work.

Superman is totally proud of his Nevelson sculpture. He used his super patience with the gluing and painting.

Finally. Rectangle Day! We learned about Josef Albers and spent some time planning our compositions using our favorite colors...

...then we assembled the finished products.

We ended Rectangle Day, and camp, with a quick Rothko composition.

I suppose I should have emphasized smudging and smearing a little more, but for 5-year-olds I think they did really well. 

Clearly, what I did NOT do on my summer vacation was blog about camp. One more to go. Maybe by Halloween?