Description of the Unit – Students will explore the kaleidoscopic, expressionistic animal-centered paintings of Modern artist Franz Marc, applying the same concepts to their own compositions in oil pastel.
Continue reading “5th Grade – Franz Marc and his Kaleidoscopic Animal Paintings”Category: Drawing
6th Grade – Arabic Geometric ‘Tiles’
Description of the Unit – Students will explore the centuries-old geometric patterns found in Islamic architecture. Students will use mathematical techniques as instructed in Eric Bourg’s marvelous book, Islamic Geometric Patterns, to re-create a variety of the patterns they have explored through their observations.

7th Grade – Fashion Design
Description of the Unit – Students will create their own fashion line, featuring at least three different looks that share a unifying theme, be it color, pattern, line or particular article of clothing or accessory.

4th Grade – Intro to Orphism with Sonia and Robert Delaunay
Description of the Unit – Students will discover Orphism through the work of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, creating their own Orphism-style design, focusing specifically on the dynamics of color.
Continue reading “4th Grade – Intro to Orphism with Sonia and Robert Delaunay”2nd Grade – Paul Klee’s Whimsical Cats
Description of the Unit – Students will explore color and shape as they create a cat face modeled after Klee’s geometric and colorful “Cat and Bird.”
Continue reading “2nd Grade – Paul Klee’s Whimsical Cats”7th Grade – Movement, Repetition and Balance with Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe
Description of the Unit – Emphasizing movement, balance and repetition with Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe
This unit revisits a second-grade unit which also focused on the Hourloupe to practice line and pattern; here we go further to practice the above-mentioned principles of design.
Continue reading “7th Grade – Movement, Repetition and Balance with Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe”3rd Grade – Paul Klee’s Magic Square Series
Description of the Unit –
Students delve into a particular period of Paul Klee’s art, the “Magic Square” series. Students use their observations of Klee’s work to create their own cityscape in oil pastels, focusing primarily on geometric shapes and using one tone of color dotted with its complementary color.
Continue reading “3rd Grade – Paul Klee’s Magic Square Series”7th Grade – Colored Pencil Techniques and Still Life
Description of the Unit –
Students will learn and practice essential colored pencil techniques involving mark-making and shading to create a still life.
Activity statement –
Coloring with colored pencils can be a deeply rich and satisfying experience. Something about the feel of the medium as it is spread across paper, and then combined with other colors to slowly come to life, can be both thrilling and meditative. Given some basic techniques students can achieve highly rewarding results.

6th Grade – Chiaroscuro Still Life Drawing and CJ Hendry
Description of the Unit –
We begin by diving into the fascinating art of CJ Hendry. Hendry expresses having no formal art training and considers herself “not very creative.” Yet she’s a dedicated, innovative artist whose works are primarily hyper-realistic, large scale pencil drawings of (mostly) luxury objects that sometimes take 200 hours to complete. Working with pencil on paper her pieces are achieved through layers of what she refers to as scribbles. Watching her work (you can see some fun videos of her at work here: https://youtu.be/KB8vc9M4QWs and https://youtu.be/KixMpzhMS-o) students become awe-struck by the way her tireless pencil strokes become such lifelike, more-than-photographic representations of real-life objects. They wonder aloud how she does it, exclaiming that they would love to draw like Hendry. I tell them that this unit will give them a foundation for getting there.

5th Grade – Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkins
Description of the Unit –
Yayoi Kusama is one of my favorite contemporary artists. Her irreverence, originality, rebelliousness and whimsy have won my heart, as have her personal struggles with mental illness. An artist whose work always surprises and delights, I love to bring her life story and work to my students.
Together we explore and discuss the work of this seminal Japanese artist, whose pioneering installations have enthralled visitors to her work over the last several decades. Using her iconic polka-dotted pumpkins as inspiration, students will emphasize the elements of line, color and shape, and well as principles of pattern, repetition and movement, in their own brightly colored pumpkins.
