Wigging Out Over Warhol!

So this summer I had the privilege of teaching at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in downtown Nashville. I had such a blast, especially since the most recent exhibition to come on display while I was teaching was Warhol Live. This gave me the opportunity to explore some fun Warhol inspired art lessons. I think my favorite was the Warhol Portrait lesson that I did...

First I took a photograph of each student, then using photoshop, I turned those photos into black and white, elevated the contrast, and finally posterized. Then I printed out 3 photocopies of each kiddo, and one copy on a transparency. The students got to color these photos first using the crayola get fx markers, then using crayons with watercolor, and finally they got to chose their own media for their third. I know coloring isn't the most artistic thing to do with the students, but these were 5-7 year olds and it gave them the opportunity to see the different types of media and the marks those media can make. Lastly on the transparencies, the first week's group I had them use acrylic paint on the back of the transparency, so the image still faced the same direction as the rest of the photocopies. I wasn't all that impressed with the results, so the second group I tried having them use oil pastels, and I liked the results better.

Teaching this summer was a great opportunity for me to experiment and inspire me to create lessons for my kiddos this fall. Here are some of the results!

4th Grade Hero Portraits

 Jumping off of Martin Luther King day, I spoke with my fourth graders about heroes, what makes a hero a hero, who are their heroes, and what adjectives can be used to describe their heroes, (incorperating a little bit of language.) In this lesson I also gave students the opportunity to chose the materials that they wanted to work in. Students could chose from colored pencils, markers, crayons, water colors, and/ or tissue paper with mod podge. The requirements were to create a border that allowed space for them to write their adjectives, (which also had to be writen in cursive!), a portrait of their hero, and to fill the space with color. We had also completed a portrait lesson earlier in the year which the drawings were done fairly well, but the painting did not turn out so great. These portraits are much better, and only one of three classes have completed this assignment, so hopefully more are to come! * See below the first portrait is of me! I'm my students hero- yay!