Students participate in the art making process once per week throughout the school year. During the early years, students are exposed to lessons on the basics of art through a hands-on process inspired by their surrounding world in conjunction with art history and contemporary art. Themes revolve around daily life that can be seen through line, shape and color and those intricacies that evolve. There are discussions involving their perception of the subject and students are shown reproductions of art works that relate to the lesson. The curriculum includes the following:
Elements of Design
- LINE: Students learn to identify types of lines (straight, curved, wavy, broken, dotted, brad, fine, zigzag, etc.); they create lines with a variety of tools and media (pen, pencil, charcoal, paint, clay tools, etc.); they use line to create shape and form, pattern and texture, and rhythm.
First and Second Grades draw lines from natural forms: shells, rocks and driftwood. They create objects and collage them into a seascape in pencil, marker, pastel and watercolor. Looking at fabric print samples of contemporary artists, Fourth Grade draws a portion from those designs. Using markers or watercolor, the students use their drawing of the fabric sample as a starting point to reinvent a new design to be used as a repeat and/or a narrative within a square format. Fifth Grade looks at the symbolic language of Keith Haring, and creates figurative symbols in simple forms that represent a universally understood personal language.
- COLOR: Students observe the spectrum of color through the forms in nature, fractured by a prism, and with the reading of the color wheel. They name, identify and mix primary and secondary colors and intermediate colors from primary and secondary. They also learn to name and identify complementary colors, to mute colors, to make browns using complementary colors, and to name and use cool and warm colors. Students recognize that warm colors stand out and cool colors recede. They also learn the value of the lightness or darkness of color. They mix tints (light values) by adding color to white and shades (dark values) by adding black to color. They name and use neutrals: black, white and gray. They identify the three qualities of color: hue, value and intensity.
Third Grade, inspired by Henri Matisse’s cutout color compositions, create collages of images from cut colored shapes. Fifth Grade study nature through painters Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Dove, draw from nature and learn color mixing in an abstracted still life painting from close observation of one object.
- SHAPE AND FORM: Students identify shape as an area enclosed by a line, name geometric shapes (triangle, square, rectangle, cylinder, circle and oval), and arrange shapes to create composition. They recognize shape as two-dimensional and identify geometric forms (sphere, pyramid, cone and cube). Students recognize form as three-dimensional and look at geometric forms in nature (tree trunk as cylinder).
First Grade observes Renaissance cathedrals’ rosette windows of stained glass designs and mandalas, work on a circular format, and create an abstract design from the center out of connecting shapes and colors into a pattern. Fourth Grade draws from a still life of three round objects. They focus on building volume and mass by creating shadows to produce forms in pastel. Fifth Grade looks at Native American totem poles and creates totems by dividing animals’ faces into large abstracted shapes to represent their family clan in pastel, sawdust and beans.
- SPACE: Students identify positive space as the area within shapes and forms. They also learn to identify negative space as the area around shapes and forms.
Fourth and Fifth Grades draw the shapes of objects in a still life, and paint the negative space black and the positive space (the objects) white. Second Grade looks at pumpkins and draws from memory to create a pumpkin patch from three-sized colored papers. Students paper collage a landscape composed of three colors to represent the foreground (land), middle ground (mountains), and background (sky). Then, they collage cut pumpkins from large in the foreground to small toward the middle-ground onto the collaged landscape. They draw pumpkins to match the collaged ones in the spaces in-between.
- TEXTURE: Students name and identify a variety of textures (rough, smooth, shiny and dull), identify the difference between tactile and visual texture, and achieve visual texture through rubbings over tactile surfaces.
Kindergarten makes pastel rubbings from their immediate surroundings to create a collaged background to draw a map of their house, beginning with their bedroom in oil pastel. Fourth and Fifth Grades paint a variety of textures on acetate and hand rub to produce a print.
Principles of Design
UNITY is created through a harmonious combination of all of the design elements.
EMPHASIS implies dominance of important parts, ideas or forms over others thus creating a dynamic in composition.
BALANCE is an arrangement that achieves equilibrium in the eye of the viewer through symmetrical, asymmetrical or dynamic balance.
VARIETY adds interest to art. PATTERN is the regular repeat of line, texture, color, shape or form.
PROPORTION as size relationships of part to each other or to the whole. Large shapes appear to be close up: small are far away.
RHYTHM is created through pattern, repetition and direction of lines.
ABSTRACTION is reducing a realistic image to simple forms and shapes.
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| Kindergarten Art |
- DRAWING: Students learn to draw from memory, imagination and observation. They use a variety of tools: pencil, felt pen, charcoal, crayon, pastels and ink. They express individual ideas, thoughts and feelings through drawing and learn about and practice contour drawing, shading, techniques, cross-hatching and stippling. Fifth grade is introduced to two-point perspective and draw action figures.
Art History: Michelangelo, Alice Kneel, Charles Sheeler
Projects: Third Grade, using their bodies and looking at a skeleton model, fold vertical black paper into four sections and draw a white skeleton in proportion within each section. They draw a second figure on an attached paper complete with skin, face and limbs in full costume. This has to match the skeleton in proportion, height and width in oil pastel. Fifth Grade draws in nature, sketching only the lines observed in natural forms to create a composition. They generate several one to three minute drawings. This exercise is coupled with creating sketches from viewing slides of famous nature paintings of the Ninetieth and Twentieth Centuries. Fourth Grade looks at each other and draws a portrait focusing on proportions of the face, neck and shoulders in pastels.
- PAINTING: Students paint with a variety of painting media: tempera, acrylic, watercolor, and with a variety of tools: brushes, sponges and fingers. They learn brush control and how to use the brush to achieve different lines and effects: dry brush, wash, etc. They understand the concepts of foreground, middle-ground and background, observe and recognize the painting styles of important artists and periods in painting, and identify the difference between abstract and realistic painted images. They will express individual ideas, thoughts and feelings through painting and will apply what was learned about color to painting. Students also learn about still life, landscape and cityscape painting.
Art History: Impressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, Renaissance painting, folk painting, narrative painting, Naturalists
Projects: Third graders discuss how a rainbow is made. Then, they draw and color the rainbow in marker using the correct order of colors across a full sheet of paper. Students cut and incorporate their rainbow into an animal of the land, sea or sky, performing an activity, in its environment on larger paper in tempera paint. Third and fourth graders paint a monochromatic painting of a winter wonder landscape from blue, white and black in tempera paint. Second graders create an optical illusion painting using two complementary colors in tempera paint. Fifth graders look at Henri Matisse’s still life paintings and make a collage of a corner in a room with two colors to learn one-point perspective. They set up a still life, and paint it bold and colorful over the collaged surface.
- PRINTMAKING: Students create prints by manipulating and designing with a variety of materials: fingerprint and palm prints, leaf prints, Styrofoam, linoleum, cardboard shapes and string glued on cardboard background (calligraphic) and monotype printing from acetate. They learn about making an artist’s proof and an edition. Students also create the illusion of action by making multiple prints of the same image on the same page.
Projects: Kindergarten and First Grades create stamp textures and designs out of model magic, foam, and sponge, ink in tempera paint and print in a repeated pattern.
- SCULPTURE: Students identify sculpture as three-dimensional and understand the difference between sculpture (in the round) and two-dimensional art (flat). They construct sculptures from a variety of materials: clay, wood pieces, toothpicks, found objects and materials, including folded paper, wire, plaster, paper mache and cardboard. They cast a plaster relief sculpture in a clay mold and stain it, learn the additive and subtractive methods of sculpting, and learn the basic hand-building techniques for clay: slab method, pinch pot and coil method.
Projects: Fourth Grade looks at Alexander Calder’s mobiles and stabiles. Students create shaped designs in foam core, painted in tempera on both sides. They construct a table top or suspended sculpture of wire and foam core without using glue and paying close attention to balance and design. Fifth Grade studies African tribe and Ndebele mud house designs derived from customs and celebrations. Students made slip from clay with a glue bond, constructed a house of cardboard designed to endure desert heat and encased the house in mud. They painted a patterned design symbolic of celebration in acrylic, straw and hemp.
- COLLAGE & MONTAGE: Students create a picture or composition using a variety of materials, including fabrics, wallpaper, colored papers, string, found objects, pictures and text from magazines, photographs and corrugated cardboard.
- INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECTS: The studio art curriculum and academic teachers’ projects share similar themes: the human body, nature, animals, marine life, different cultures and history. Often, we coordinate to provide students with a broader perspective of the subject to include an art making component. In addition, multimedia projects and school presentations include an art component such as Second Grade, The Map of the World and the Third Grade State Fair. In addition, students participate in large-scale individual portrait painting and collaborative mural painting depicting images relating to their academic subject.