Sunflower Paintings

Third grade students learned about the sunflower paintings by Vincent van Gogh.  I found a great site called Art History Mom that gave some great kid-friendly information about his paintings.  Check it out at:http://www.arthistorymom.com/post-impressionism/a-flower-delivery-to-you-and-your-kids-from-vincent-van-gogh/
I love this project.  They always turn out great and the kids learn a lot.  We talked about painting with brushstrokes, variety, overlapping and value.  Here are some of our finished paintings.  

Recycled Cardboard Faces

First grade students learned about creating art from recycled materials or found objects.  We looked at found object FACES made by artist Jim Shores.  You can see his work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimshoresart/sets/1007675/. 
We also looked at the Faces iMake app for the iPad.  There are some cute, short videos that show how to arrange objects in different ways to create faces.  
I randomly cut scraps of cardboard on the paper cutter in a variety of sizes.  We spent one class just experimenting with using the shapes to create different faces and showing different emotions.  
The next class students created their final design and glued it together.  We use tempera paint to paint the face and blended cray-pa for the features. 
Students also got a chance to use the Faces iMake app on the ipad to create a face too.
Here are some of our finished pieces:

Pixel Portraits

Second grade students had fun creating pixel portraits using graph paper and the iPad app Pixel Booth.  At first it was a little bit of a challenge to think of making their people using the square shape instead of using lines.  I also found an online pixel drawing site that the kids could use on my Smart Board.  Students took turns using the iPad app while they were drawing on the graph paper.  I think they turned out great and the kids had a lot of fun making them.