Kindergarten Castles

This week, Kindergartners were inspired by the talented artist Leonid Afremov, who created this beautiful castle painting below, using shapes like squares, triangles and half circles.

In class, we used the crayon resist technique to create our own beautiful shape castles. First, we drew the castles in crayon using straight, zigzag and curvy lines as well as shapes like squares, rectangles, circles, ovals, half circles and triangles. 

When we finished the drawing part, we used liquid watercolor paint to bring our castles to life. Watercolor is naturally resistant to waxy crayons, so we could paint right on top of the drawing, and the crayon would shine through.

Little Clouds

Today in Nursery, I read the children the book "Little Clouds" by Eric Carle. There were different images of clouds that took the shape of things like animals, planes and clowns.

After we finished the story, we split into 3 groups to create art about clouds.

The first group created landscapes using different papers.

The second group used white paint and animal stamps to create animal shaped clouds:

The third group created a large collaborative mural of clouds using paintbrushes:

Matisse Leaf Watercolors

The 5th graders learned about Henri Matisse in art this week. He was a French impressionist artist known for his use of vivid color.

We created our own version of Matisse's cutout series. In order to get the effect we wanted, first we had to saturate our papers with liquid watercolors in cool tones. Next, when our paper was really wet, we added our custom cut-outs, Matisse loved to use cut-outs in his art, he referred to this as "painting with scissors." Then, we brushed a little more water on the top of the paper, and left it to dry. The following class, we removed the cut-outs and it left this awesome diffused leaf effect.