What do you know about Vincent van Gogh?

"He cut off his ear and gave it to a girl."  That was the most popular answer! 

Our third project of the year was based on Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night.  He is one of my favorite artists of all time.  We started our lesson off talking about van Gogh, We looked at two of his self portraits and shared what we knew. We looked at Starry Night, and discussed what we saw. We talked about what a landscape is. I explained foreground, middle ground, and background to them.  We talked about impasto. There was so much for us to discuss; everyone had something to say.

The really exciting part was making the project, though.  They started by creating a landscape of their own, which would serve as their middle ground.  They could put anything they wanted into their landscape. Some went with houses, some went with nature, and others wanted animals.

While they worked on creating their world, I had them work with me in pairs to create their background.  We marbleized paper by using shaving cream! All you have to do is add drops of paint on top of a layer of shaving cream, swirl it around, and then place your paper on top. Peel the paper up, scrape off the shaving cream, and the swirly color stays!  We used night sky colors and gold for stars.  They came out beautifully!



Day 2 started with a quick review of van Gogh and Starry Night.  Next, they added their final details with oil pastel to their landscapes. We looked at the cypress tree in Starry Night and a couple photographs of cypress trees, and then they worked on creating their own.  After they finished up, they cut out their landscape and cypress tree, glued them onto their background, and added an "impasto effect" to their cypress trees using glue mixed with black acrylic paint. They also touched up their stars and added a couple more using gold paint. The projects turned out wonderful! I was so happy with the results, and they were really proud of their work.  

Fall Colors

Project 2!


For our second project, I decided to have them make home made scratch art.

First, we discussed fall and the colors that we see on trees. We started our project by coloring a piece of tagboard.  They had to make sure that they colored in all the paper that was showing. We used fall colors. Once every spot was colored, we painted over the entire thing with black acrylic paint, and set it aside to dry.  While the students were waiting for their projects to dry, they practiced drawing leaves, using some reference photographs that I printed from the computer. I would have loved to take them out on a nature walk or simply bring in some leaves to look at, however this was during one of the many rainy weeks that we had in October. Once their papers dried, I demonstrated how to simply use their pencil to draw their design onto the black. This scrapes the black coating off and leaves the colored parts below.

Here are some pictures from the day, though they aren't the best quality, unfortunately!