James Rizzi Citiscapes

My son introduced me to this fun artist.  He came home talking about an artist he learned about in art class at his school.  He liked him so much I decided to look him up.  I immediately knew that my kids would love looking at his whimsical city scapes too.  My son's project was done in watercolors but I adapted it to be a mixed media project.  They came out great.  The kids were so into them and added lots of details that made them all so different.  Here are some photos of the finished pieces.  If you would like to see all of them you can visit our online gallery here:  http://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?project=1157672

Collage People

While looking around on Pinterest I came upon the artist MALIN KOORT.  We looked at her amazing paper illustrations.  Check her out here:  http://malinkoort.blogspot.se/.  The kids really enjoyed looking at her work and were very inspired.  We started out by making a paper person but soon the kids were into creating little environments for them.  It was very difficult to take pictures of them but here are a few views.  

Winter Starry Night

My second grade students looked at Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night picture.  We used cray-pa and watercolor resist to create our night skies and then collaged our trees and villages on top.  Details were then added with color pencil. We also used white paint for snow and a little glitter glue to add sparkle to the moon and stars. 
I tried to encourage my students to add some things that they noticed about van Gogh's artwork into their own.  Many of them added texture, used different lines similar to his brushstrokes, and added different shades of colors in the sky, stars and trees.

As a review we used the app Popplet on the iPad to make mind-maps about what inspired them about starry night.

Mixed Media Collage

Second grade students looked at the work of Henri Rousseau for inspiration on this project.  We talked about his use of overlapping and value.  I love mixed media projects because students get a chance to practice using lots of different art materials.  We used tempera paint for our animals, watercolor wash for the backgrounds and construction paper and crayons to create the collage.  

Underwater Collages

Third grade students used their sea creatures and ocean backgrounds from their stop motion animations to create these beautiful collages.  We talked about different ways to incorporate texture (visual and tactile), overlapping and variety of large, small and medium sized shapes.  

Here are the 4 finished movies created by the third grade classes.  I took all of the short clips made by each student and combined them all into one using imovie.  If you want to know more about how we made these movies see my earlier post on Stop Motion Animation

Mrs. Normandin and Mrs. Gregoire


Ms. Allison and Mrs Percy