Optical Art: Lines like Bridget Riley

A unit on Optical Art is always a big hit with 5th graders. I love it because non-representational art is fun to look at not too intimidating to make, so students who are not that skilled at drawing often surprise themselves by creating a wonderful piece. For this project, students studyied the life and work of Bridget Riley. I chose her because:

1) Students are not too familiar with women artists (and they should be!)
2) Her work is mostly composed of abstract line compositions and the elements of art are very easily identifiable
3) She was an art teacher too ;-)

On the first lesson we saw some cool optical illusions and defined the term. The next day we saw Bridget´s work and students were handed black construction paper and colored chalk to create similar composition —basically, parallel curved lines to create the illusion of movement. A very basic assignment with very different results. Here are some of them:

Then we took it a step further by working with shapes and complementary colors to make it pop out more. Like these:

Finally, the best part is when students go outside the box and apply what they learned to create completely original compositions, such as these:

We are currenlty woking on some Victor Vasarely checkerboard radials. Will post as soon as they´re finished, i´m sure they´ll be just as awesome :-)

Matisse Cut-out collages

It´s so hard to choose student work to post. I have approximately 50 students per grade level, so every project gives me around that many works to choose from. Sometimes they´re all so wonderful i hate to leave some out, as is the case of the 6th Grade Matisse Cutout collages.

6th graders had been learning about the Elements of Art in during the first unit and were ready to put their knowledge into practice. I chose to showcase French artist Henri Matisse for them since they are studying Europe in their Social Studies classes. We started the unit by reading and disscussing his biography, and discovering why he developed his "painting with scissors" collage technique. Next, students had to create their own cut-out collages using construction paper as paint. They made their sketches with both organic and geometric shapes and distributed them on their canvases, sometimes overlapping, considering positive and negative space. The different sizes and colors created very interesting texture.

I wish i could post all their work because they are seriously wonderful, but the longest blog post ever. Here are a couple chosen at random so i wouldn´t feel biased ;-)

Keith Haring Dance Party!

5th grade students have the most fun: We had a dance party in class the other day! It was actually a 3 part lesson regarding american artist Keith Haring and the Elements of Art. Here is how it went:

On DAY ONE we saw images of Keith Haring´s work and students identifyied the elements of art (line, shape, form, color, space, value and texture) within them, and they way they work in his compositions. Afterwards, students were handed a page with his biography and in pairs they summarized the main ideas. We later discussed discrimination and why ignorance equals fear.

DAY 2 was the most fun! Half the students get up while the other half remains seated and is handed different colored sheets of construction paper (3 each). 80s music is played while the students standing up dance. Suddenly, the music stops and dancers must freeze in their poses, becoming statues while the other half of the class draws their outline. This is repeated 3 times, one for each different color of construction paper. Next, the drawing students become the dancers and vice versa.

On DAY 3 students cut out their dancing shapes and pasted them onto poster board, trying to use space in an interesting way. Afterwards, they outlined their shapes with black marker and created radiant lines or movement lines (or both) around them. Voilá!



Finally, here is the finished work. Maginificent, isn´t it? :-D