Description of the Unit – Students will observe Henri Rousseau’s paintings of tigers in the jungle with the objective of understanding foreground and background.
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Tag: art
6th Grade – Chuck Close-inspired Self Portraits
Description of the Unit – Students observed and discussed the work of contemporary American painter Chuck Close, a technically innovative artist known particularly for his large-scale photo-realist portraits. Students applied Close’s use of a grid to break down a self-portrait into individually colored squares that together create a cohesive whole.
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8th Grade – Chiaroscuro Drawing with 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 beget such lifelike representations of real-life objects.
7th Grade – Japanese Notan Designs
Description of the Unit –
In this unit, students observed the traditional Japanese art of Notan designs, exploring the relationship between positive and negative space between elaborately cut designs, and how this relationship affects composition, balance and symmetry. Students created their own Notan designs.
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6th Grade – Frank Stella, Protractor Series Designs
Description of the Unit – Students will observe and discuss the work of Frank Stella, focusing particularly on his Protractor series, and will themselves use a protractor to create designs inspired by this series.
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5th Grade – Found Art Assemblage Inspired by the Art of Louise Nevelson
Description of the Unit – Students will explore the monochromatic, found-art assemblages of Louise Nevelson, and create their own in small groups.
Kindergarten – Picasso’s Dog Lump
Description of the Unit – It’s a fun experiment to introduce students this young to the concept of multiple perspectives. To approach this concept in a playful way, students created a Picasso-inspired oil pastel illustration of his beloved dog Lump.
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2nd Grade – Recreating Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers
Description of the Unit – Second grade students explored Vincent van Gogh’s unique style of painting by observing and then recreating his famous Sunflowers still life.
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8th Grade – Playing with Pedro Linares’ Alebrije
Description of the Unit –
Students learned about Mexican artist Pedro Linares López and his fantastical, wild Alebrijes, imaginative and colorful papier-mâché creatures that Linares originated. Students created their own Alebrijes out of clay, paint and various objects.
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7th Grade – Mark-making and Pen Drawing
Description of the Unit –
Students will first practice a variety of line drawing, or mark-making, techniques, and then use those techniques to render a landscape or still life in pen.
Activity statement –
Using photographs as a starting point, the objective of this lesson was for students to express changes in perspective, texture and value (light and dark) in a realistic drawing using a variety of lines, such as stippling, hatching, and cross-hatching, as well as varying the lines’ density. In this way they can transform a pen drawing into a realistic representation of a scene in nature. To help in this objective, students first created a mark-making chart expressing different types of lines, and discussed how the different types of lines could be used to represent texture, perspective and value.
In the K-8 Art Studio with Anita Sagastegui 