Beverly Buchanan Kindergarten Clay Houses

Kindergartners love to draw houses... and even more, they love to make them out of clay.  We chatted all about clay - what it is, where does it comes from, how can we make it flat and most of all how can we add texture.

After drawing a sketch of a house, we used a rolling pin to flatten the clay into a slab.  Then we pressed found objects into the clay. 

Matisse inspired Snowflakes

Winter seemed like the perfect theme for our artwork.  Since mother nature isn't making much snow for us this winter, we decided we would make the snow ourselves.

Matisse got us thinking............

• How would using warm or cool colors change the feeling in my artwork?

• How can I make shapes that have symmetry and radial symmetry?

• Why do I think positive and negative spaces are important in my artwork?

1st grade did a great job!  I love how everyones' looked different from the way they organized their cool colors and arranged their snowflakes to the individuality in each flake of snow ... no two are the same.

Mondrian meets Kandinsky

In this project 1st grade viewed and discussed Piet Mondrian's Grey Tree and Wassily Kandinsky's Colour Study of Squares.

We pondered .... "What if Mondrian and Kandinsky were friends and decided to make an artwork together? What would it look like?"
Since Mondrian was fasincated with balance(symmetry and asymmetry)and Kandinsky loved playing with colors, maybe it would look like these wonderful beauties.

To make these abstracted trees we painted the background either warm or cool colors using a wet-on-wet process. Then we used a monoprint technique to make a symmetrical tree and circles. Using tempera we experimented with the primary and secondary color schemes as well as creating light and dark values.