4 Medium Challenge

Grade 4 students have been exploring many different meduims used to create art. Today, they were challenged to create a piece of art using at least 3 different mediums. They were asked to complete an observational drawing and explain why they chose each medium.

Here are a few of the amazing artworks! 

Salt on water colour paint created a bumpy texture for the basket ball!

This students used oil pastel for the leaves and chose water colour paint for the background to create shadows -and because it was easy to paint around the many edges! 

Permanent marker was used to draw the container. Water colour pencils helped to create highlights and shadows. 

Exploring Mediums

Grade 4 students are exploring the question, "How does the medium we choose affect our final art work?". We tried making marks with many different kinds of mediums: oil pastels, markers, sharpies, water colour pencils and colouring pencils.

Some reflections:

• Pencils are better for making detailed pictures! -Alex
• Oil pastels are better for colouring in things quickly. -Teja
• Oil pastels create different textures! -Nishka
• Oil pastels can be blended. Paint cant. -Dylan
• It's easier to draw details with colouring pencils and permanent markers. -Quinten & Maria
• Markers give you more control. -Sirine
• Permanent markers were darker than the normal markers. -Amelie
• Oil pastels can give dark marks or light marks -Vazir

Next students added water on top of the marks to see what happened. They made a guess about what they thought would happen first.

• The markers almost disappeared. -Romy
• The water colour pencils blended into the water. 
• The permanent markers didn't change! - 
• I thought that the water pencils would not blend with the water. -Injoon and lots of other people!

Goal Setting

Finding out what students know in art is a very important way to ensure progress and set appropriate goals. One of the ways that students are self assessing and goal setting this year in art class is through a drawing assessment. Each student in the grades 2-5 classes completed a 10 minute observational drawing of the same subject (a cup of art supplies). They critiqued their work and set goals for observational drawing this year. We will do the same activity later in the year to identify areas of improvement and set new goals.

Drawing Animals: Geometric Shapes to Organic Shapes

Grade 3 students are busy at work in their home room classes, completing an ecosystems project. To support this end of unit project, students are developing their drawing skills in Visual Art class. Knowing how to observe animals carefully to find shapes will help them to design their comics, murals and dioramas. Take a look at some of their practice drawings. Students all agreed that this lesson was challenging, but everyone felt proud of their accomplishments by the end of class. Great job Grade 3!

Print Making

Wow! What a fun day in Grade 3!

Today, after many lessons of preparation, students finally broke out the brayers and printing ink! After putting the finishing touches (textures such as dots and lines) on their plates, they rolled the ink on their plate and waited eagerly. The final results were "really awesome!" Students tried many combinations of coloured inks and papers to get different effects. In our next class we we will reflect on our work and make a plan for our one final print! Here are some pictures from our session today:

Learning to draw using geometric and organic shapes

This plate is all ready to go!

The camel print


Using the brayer to ink the plate...

Finally! We get to see the print!

Into the drying rack! What colours next?

 THE GALLERY WALK

Dressed in scarves, hats and ties, students walked around our gallery critiquing their prints.  Great artistic language was used by all as we talked about the good things each artist had done.  

Drawing Skills

Students in Grade 3 are preparing for a print making project where they will make relief prints of UAE animals. We are learning some drawing skill before we begin our print. In this lesson, students drew an animal. They talked about what they were thinking when they were drawing. Later, when Mrs Murphy suggested students looked for shapes in the animals, they were able to use the shapes to make very detailed creatures! Here is some of their work: