Castle and Sun

 

A few years back I did a collage project with year 1 students based on Paul Klee's 1928 painting 'The Castle and the Sun'. You can see my post on that project HERE.

'Castle and Sun'. Paul Klee. 1928.

I recently revisited this iconic panting with year 2 students. Students were asked to "build" their own castle using a pencil and ruler to draw stacked geometric shapes to create walls, towers, doors, windows etc. We began with orange paper and students then used oil pastel to colour the shapes individually before outlining their drawing with black pastel.

 

Monkey Portraits

My grade 2 students recently celebrated Chinese New Year with these monkey portraits for Year of the Monkey. These were inspired by the Pop Art Chimp paintings over at MaryMaking. 

After discussing portraiture and viewing some examples of famous portraits, students were given photos of many types of monkeys, chimps and apes and we discussed how to build up our drawings using basic shapes (e.g oval head, semi-circle ears, triangle nose etc).

Once the drawings were complete, students outlined them in permanent marker before adding wildly colourful painting using tempera paints. Some also worked back into their paintings with oil pastel once dry. 

I never stop being amazed at my very young students abilities to create faces full of such personality and use colour so fearlessly and expertly.

Rainforest Landscapes with Toucans

This lesson was inspired by the toucan drawings at Art with Mrs. Seitz. 

I wanted to reinforce some of the aspects of landscape painting such as foreground, midground, background, focal point and creating depth by overlapping. 

Students used pictures of toucans and rainforests as reference for their drawings. Once complete, students outlined in permanent marker, coloured in oil pastels and then used a wash of green edicol dye to complete. (Watercolour should work the same).