Gelli Print Flowers

Here are some large scale flowers that my students made from Gelli Prints. I talked about Gelli Printing in my previous post. My kids absolutely love making Gelli Prints and I think these turned out awesome. The students worked in stations to trace and cut out circles and petal shapes. They then glued them together. I hung up their flowers in the back hallway of our school by the art room.

 

Gelli Prints

I took a professional development class this year from one of our district's awesome high school art teachers. The class was over Gelli Printing. I had never heard of this technique before but found it very interesting and so did my students. I used a recipe I found online to make more permanent Gelli Plates although you can buy them. I could not find where I had written down the recipe we were given at the professional development session. The recipe I used just called for gelatin, glycerine, and rubbing alcohol. I made several plates over Spring Break in various sized casserole dishes. My principal approved the purchase of a small refrigerator to keep in the art room for Gelli Plate storage. Here are some prints my students from Kinder all the way through Fifth Grade made. They used whatever colors of tempera they wanted and a variety of texture tools. I'll post later some of the finished projects they turned their prints into.

Kindergarten Kandinsky Inspired Art

Kindergarten created abstract paintings based on the works of Wassily Kandinsky. They first used cardboard tubes to stamp black circles all over their paper. They then added implied texture by printing small circles on top with bubble wrap and peach paint. Once these had both dried, the water colored the inside of the circles and painted over the rest of the white space. The use of water colors on top of the peach tempera paint allowed the bubble wrap design to still show through.

Wayne Thiebaud: Collaborative Projects

The students typically work on collaborative projects each Friday once their individual projects are completed. During our study of Wayne Thiebaud, the students created large scale drawings, paintings, and collages of cupcakes and cakes. Some of the cakes were painted with water colors. Some of the collages were made with torn and cut pieces of paper. Other collages were created with magazine pictures in a color blocking style. These were displayed in our cafeteria on three new display panels our school was able to purchase this year. We use the panels as backgrounds for music programs and to display art throughout the year.

Wayne Thiebaud: Kindergarten Ice Cream Cones

While studying artist Wayne Thiebaud, Kindergarten drew ice cream cones filling the entire picture plane. They started by folding their paper in half vertically. They drew one ice cream cone with details and then had to repeat the exact same drawing on the right side. They then traced them with colored pencils and painted them with water colors. These were displayed for Open House as a part of our larger Wayne Thiebaud display.

Wayne Thiebaud: Kindergarten Cupcakes

I taught an artist study to all of my students from Kinder through Fifth Grade. Kindergarten made oversized cupcakes with texture. They first traced a template for the bottom portion and cut it out. They then drew a cloud shape and cut it out for the frosting. After gluing it on to the base, it was time to add texture to the frosting. I helped them mix baking soda and white tempera paint. They painted this all over the frosting. Once dry, they used Dot Paint to add fun details to the cupcake wrapper. They then added small pom poms for sprinkles in various colors and a large red pom pom on top for a cherry. All of their cupcakes were displayed for Open House.

Dale Chihuly Chandeliers

For a collaborative project my Kindergarten, First, and Second Graders created three Dale Chihuly inspired chandeliers made out of plastic. Each student was given a 3M brand lamination pouch. They opened the pouch and used two colors of permanent markers to color all over them. After they were done, I laminated them in our classroom laminator. (Fellow teachers, if you do not have one of these, get one. They are inexpensive and very useful for smaller projects. I personally think the lamination is thicker and better quality than typical laminators.)  Once they were laminated, the students learned how to cut the film into spiral shapes by starting with a large circle. They then worked together to connect five or six spirals in the middle with pipe cleaners. As they completed this, they brought them to me and we worked together to hook the pipe cleaners all together. Once completed, we originally hung them up in the windows by the art room but they were too heavy and fell. So, we ended up combining them into one large chandelier and hung them on a rolling garment rack that I previously used for a pocket chart stand.

Dale Chihuly: Kinder, First, and Second Grades

I did an artist study on Dale Chihuly with all of my students a few months ago. We looked at his various artworks, learned about the process to create glass, and then they made their own kid friendly version. Each student used washable markers to decorate a coffee filter in at least three colors. As they finished this step, they went to a station by the sink to spray their coffee filters with water. They were amazed at how the colors ran together. They then placed their coffee filters on top of a cup with a rubber band around it to hold it in place. After they dried, I sprayed them with spray starch to make the shapes hold. The students then glued them to a black cardstock base.

 

Noun Neighborhhood

This is a lesson I always did when I taught first grade. Now that I'm in art, I extended it to a collaborative project for Kinder through Third Grade. Each student drew their favorite restaurant, their favorite store, and their home. They created roads, grass, trees, clouds, and various vehicles. After all classes had a chance to do this, they worked over the next few weeks to create a giant collage mural out of them. Once completed, their art project covered almost half of our back hallway which is pretty long. As they worked, we talked about what nouns were and how each thing they were creating was a noun. We talked about the role of different parts of a community to tie in Social Studies.