Warhol Tissue Paper Flowers

Inspired by these Warhol prints...

 One of the projects I did for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts summer camp was a tissue paper print. In this instance I had pre-cut tissue paper flowers, had the students arrange the flowers on their white drawing paper and spray them using a water bottle. Once the papers were sprayed, the students pealed their flowers off of their papers, leaving the stain from the colored tissue. *** Make sure when doing this that your art tissue paper is the type that is bleeding.
Day 2 students go back into their artwork with a sharpie marker to draw details around their flowers. There are so many other things you could use to add grass and I do plan on altering this lesson some before bringing it into my classroom this fall, but I very much enjoyed the results! Also the students didn't much care for the outcomes of their works until the next day when they added the details- or at least I got that comment from one student that I remember... not every lesson is fabulous until it's finished!

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!

Monet Waterlilies

Hello all! While most of you are enjoying your summer vacations I continue to teach all summer long. (Needless to say I am very much looking forward to heading to Belmont for the TN Arts Academy for my "vacation.") Any who... This year our summer schedule has been redone and we are doing this quite differently. Each week the students enjoy field trips to all sorts of places such as the zoo, wave country, adventure science center and so forth. Each week is a theme based around the field trip for the week- and the teachers/ aid are teamed up and the students divided into 5 classes that are an hour and 5 minutes long instead of 10- 35 minute class periods. New classes are more life skills/ fun based such as cooking, gardening, swimming, art, ect.

This week the students went to the Waynesboro community pool which apparently is the awesomest pool with all kinds of slides and such, so this week is "water week." In art class we created Monet's Waterlilies and have also done some paper marbling with shaving cream. Check out the results.

 Monet's Waterlilies

Materials: Coffee filters, markers, a bucket of water, crayons, water colors, glue, green construction paper (lily pads) and scissors

Shaving Cream Paper Marbling

 

Paper Marbling using Shaving Cream and Liquid Watercolors (or food coloring)

After smoothing the shaving cream over a lunch tray we dribbled a few splashes of liquid water color on top (limiting the students to two colors!) The students then used the back end of paint brushes to make their line marbling patterns. A comb would also work for this step.

A piece of white drawing paper is laid over the shaving cream and gently massaged. When the paper is pulled off the pattern isn't visible yet.

Using Popsicle sticks we scrapped the shaving cream off the paper immediately after pulling the print and the design is magically revealed!

The completely scrapped paper!

The results were amazing!