End of the Year at West Street (lots of pictures)

Here's some of the last projects of the 2014-2015 school year at West Street School.

The kindergarteners continued learning about printmaking. They created a design in printmaking foam using lines and shapes. They then picked two different colors to create their Pattern Prints. They ended up printing their design a total of six times.

The first graders created Hot Air Balloons. To create the background, students cut out a cloud shape to block paint. They placed the cloud shape on their paper and used a stiff bristle brush to flick paint around the cloud shape. They repeated this until the background was filled up. They then created hot air balloons out of construction paper and had to decorate them using a pattern. Here's a couple in progress photos and then some finished examples.

With the second graders we learned about Henri Matisse and the collages he made. We made Action Figure Collages inspired by Matisse's collages. I took pictures of the students in an action pose. They then cut themselves out and used that as a tracer. They traced themselves onto construction paper and cut it out. Using their action figure and other shapes they created their collages.

With the 3rd graders we learned about Andy Warhol and the multicolor prints he made. They also learned about complementary colors and reduction printmaking. Each student was given a 6"x6" piece of printmaking foam and they only drew an animal, nothing else. We then printed our block 3 times, once in yellow, orange, and green. Then students went back into their blocks and drew some sort of background for their animals. We then printed right on top of the first three prints, using the complementary colors (red on green, blue on orange, and purple on yellow). Not all prints came out clear, some students did get confused with the complementary colors, but I think the project went well and students enjoyed trying something new.

Self-Portraits and Tiles (lots of pictures)

Here's the Chuck Close Inspired Self-Portraits I promised. The 5th graders at East Meadow learned about Chuck Close and how he creates portraits and self-portraits out of smaller shapes/colors/designs. For their self-portraits I took a photo of them. They then traced all the lines of their photo to turn themselves into a line drawing. Next they traced their line drawing onto a new piece of paper and went over their pencil marks in Sharpie. Once they were done with that, students gridded out their paper into 1"x1" squares and filled in each square with 8-10 different shapes/designs. Lastly, they colored in their shapes/designs using two colors for each section, ie: hair, skin, background, clothes.

With the 7th and 8th graders, I saw a different group each quarter. One of the projects that wasn't on display at Arts Night was the clay tiles. I wanted to share some of the tiles from this past school year. Students looked at both the North and East set of baptistry doors on the Florence Baptistry by Lorenzo Ghiberti. We discussed relief sculpture. Students also looked at Illuminated Manuscripts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They then created a relief tile using an initial.