Franz Marc Inspired Animals

Franz Marc's 'Blue Horse' was a great way to begin our discussion about why it's important to know how to draw AND the importance of being creative. Grade 3 students worked through our See-Think-Wonder visual thinking routine and came up with many interesting observations and questions about the painting.

Next, we read the book by Eric Carle 'The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse' and listened to Eric Carle talk about why Franz Marc was such an inspiration to him.

Students were very eager to get busy!

After a discussion about the use of Space when planning our art, Grade three students grabbed their very large papers and set to work, planning and drawing an animal to use the space on their page. Strategies from last day's lesson helped!

The last part was very fun! With a mixture of black paint and glue, students set to work adding dark lines of glue to their animal. Many decisions had to be made! How thick were the lines going to be? What kind of texture should they add to the animal? What lines would best suit the ecosystem and the feelings they wanted to show? 

Be sure to check back next week to see these great works of art transform as students decide how to add colour to them!

Still Life with Grade 3

I have been anxious to do this project for months and I was so happy to see that the students loved it as much as I did! We started with a warm-up contour drawing of a house plant. Grade 3 is becoming so skilled at finding the details in objects -inside and outside art class.

We then imagined our plant as if it was sitting on on the large sheet of black paper. We would have to draw it so that it filled in most of the space on our paper. Students then carefully followed the lines of the leaves and flowers until they had a beautiful line drawing. Sometimes we added extra leaves or flowers to balance our composition.

Next came the exciting part. We had to trace our lines with glue! Yes... glue. It took some practise to hold the bottle so that we got just the kind of line we wanted. Once the papers were covered with beautiful white flowers, we put them aside to dry. The glue will transform into shiny black lines, the perfect base for our chalk pastels next week! Stay tuned. They will be worth the wait.

 WEEK TWO: 

And here we are working on the chalk...

 

A final piece: Alice requested that I post her picture as a special gift to her grandma, who has been visiting her in Dubai. I love how you blended the colours Alice!