Henri Mattise Inspired Veteran's Day!

 

For our next project, we jumped right into a world of color and shape! Henri Matisse was our muse, and we read Colorful Dreamer to learn about his life and work. Our first collage project was to create a cityscape. We used all kids of fun patterned paper to build skyscrapers, houses, shops, cities, and neighborhoods. 

For our next project, each artist was asked to create an "America the Beautiful" collage. We spent time looking at photographs of our incredible country, and talking about all the things that make America special. We looked at Matisse's work again, and were all motivated to create colorful renditions of the USA with lots of overlapping and interesting shapes! Using overlapping to create space and distance is not as easy as it looks. Our Art Club artists worked very hard to grasp this skill, and really improved their understanding of space with this challenge.

 

These beautiful collages will welcome Veterans to our school for our huge Veteran's Day Celebration. The boards are finished and here they are!!

My holiday interpretation of a Matisse Masterpiece

 Our Veteran's Day was a beautiful community celebration. Our artists definitely added to the day by sharing their visions of "America the Beautiful" and their gratitude to our veterans.

Action Jackson Paintings

I found this incredible project on Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists blog. It was so fun, and I think our artists were really impressed with their action paintings. We started with a quick bio on "Action Jackson," and took some time to study Pollock's paintings. We spent the rest of the time painting. Each artist painted one canvas as well as a couple of smaller drip paintings on heavy stock paper. Artists used watered down paint in squirt bottles to work with, and were free to use brushes, palette knives, sponges, and their own hands to create their paintings. 

   

The next session, we read "Action Jackson" by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordon. We also talked about the famous painting, "The Connoisseur" that Norman Rockwell painted of an art critic looking at a Jackson Pollock painting. We took fun pictures of each artist pretending to be studying a great work of art, and then cut them out. Finally, each artist created a gallery floor out of cut paper shapes. Once everything was dry, we put it all together to create these amazing masterpieces!

Art Club Masterpieces on display at our local Tully's!!!

Deborah Butterfield Inspired Low Relief Sculptures

I found this great project on the Dick Blick site. Deborah Butterfield was our inspiration. She is famous for her beautiful horse sculptures made from natural materials. 

We looked at many examples of her work and then got busy creating. Each artist found a photo of an animal to work from, and started by tracing the animal's contour line.  After adding a layer of wax paper on top of the tracing, each artist recreated the animal with fast drying paper mache using the traced lines as a guide to build form. Before finishing, artists were encouraged to use the natural materials we had gathered from our school grounds to embellish and strengthen their designs.

Next, collages were created with painted tissue paper to build a high contrast background for each sculpture. Once the sculpture were dry, we attached them to the backgrounds with hot glue. We learned that it is better to create thick forms as the mache is very fragile. The final pieces were some of my favorites so far this year. They are now proudly on display at our local Tully's.