1st Grade Colorful Fish

This is my last beginning of the year fish project!  1st grade students drew a fish- I gave no instruction here except to fill the space by drawing a fish at least as big as their hand- then traced their lines with glue and sprinkled with sand.  I told the students we were adding sand to give our fish more texture.  In the second class, we reviewed color mixing and I gave each student primary and black colored tempera paint.  The students could paint their fish and backgrounds however they wanted.  I did not say that their fish had to be swimming in blue water though that is what most students chose.  After the first day, I started giving the student black paint but said it should only be used to paint over the raised sand surface and help us see the outline and details of the fish.  I've found that giving students black paint to mix colors tends to yield monochromatic paintings- usually all a nice mud color.  (By the way, if you want to see some awesome high school mud paintings, look here!)

Classes who only had one session and students who missed the first day of the project painted then added sand if there was time at the end.  My main goal for the project was to review painting and mixing colors- texture was my secondary goal.

Do your students love mixing colors as much as mine?  Green, pink, and "sky blue" seem to be their favorite colors to mix.  I love to listen to the students talk when they are mixing colors.  Even though they've done it before, it still seems like magic to them when they make a new color whether they are in 1st grade or 6th grade.  I love their excitement when they are allowed to just try new combinations and see what happens.

I think this looks like a Mondrian fish!

Check out the rest of the artwork in our Artsonia exhibit!

Klee-Inspired Geometric Shape Fish

My K-3rd grade school started off the year with a "Fish" theme.  The Kindergarten teachers suggested it last spring and we all just kind of went with it!  I planned a fish project for each grade.  Up first is 2nd grade, just because I finished editing their photos first!  Check out the Artsonia exhibit here, and please don't judge me for the colors being really funky, I am finding that editing with Artsonia's website is time saving since I can do it at school but not the most true to life when Auto correct and Brighten are the only ways to adjust color.  But enough about that, read on for my jabbering about the project.

  Paul Klee is an artist that I honestly didn't know very much about before starting this project.  I knew the name and knew that shapes and abstraction were involved in his work but besides seeing some lesson plans based on him, I never gave him very much thought.  I got ahold of some Art for Children books that the library was discarding and one of them was about Paul Klee.  I looked through it and mentally filed away a few ideas.  For the fish project, I showed the students three of his paintings.  

We started by looking at Klee's painting, Castle and Sun, and discussing the shapes which the students were able to identify as geometric.  (I always remind them that geometric shapes are the kind they learn about in Math class and that seems to help them remember.) I explained that they would eventually be making pictures of fish so with that in mind, the background was going to be made of squares and rectangles printed in cool colors to remind us of water.  I used my handy dandy box cutter to cut squares and rectangles out of cardboard.  I didn't worry about using a straight edge or measuring, I wanted a little variety.  The students painted tints of purple, blue, and green on the cardboard and then stamped the shape on their paper, black construction paper.  I think the added white helped the paint show up better.  The little art history lesson, introduction, and printing took the first 40-minute class period.

The best way I found to handle the paint was to put a little tray of each color at each table.  I put it on top of this weird vinyl-y stuff that I have packs and packs of.  It made a pretty good placemat and contained most of the mess.  My tables usually have about 5 students at them so I put two brushes in each paint color.  I asked the students to keep the brushes with one color so I didn't have to worry about water.  The cardboard pieces just stayed on the vinyl stuff when not in use.

During the second class, we looked at two more Klee paintings: Fish Magic and The Golden Fish.  We saw how Paul Klee used geometric shapes to construct his fish.  I actually used a Pinterest board I created about Paul Klee as a way to organize the images I wanted to show the students.  It worked really well.  I just pulled up the board at the beginning of class and it kept track of the "bookmarks" for me.  (The Philadelphia Museum of Art's website was really great because it lets you zoom in to focus on details of the paintings.)  Next, we brainstormed some different geometric shapes and I was going to draw them on the chalkboard for reference when I remembered I didn't have to!  Instead, I projected a poster that I had saved on, you guessed it, Pinterest, and the students could just look at it for ideas!

Source: awesomeartists.com via Katie on Pinterest

Afterwards, each student was given a quarter page black construction paper and asked to draw a fish as big as they could fit on on the page made out of geometric shapes.  Of course I had lots of students tell me they didn't know how so I just reminded them that they were imaginary fish and they could keep it simple like an ellipse and a triangle.  The "I can't"s and "I don't know how"s seem to be a lot worse at the beginning of the school year...

After they finished drawing in pencil, construction paper crayons were used to fill in the shapes then the fish were cut out and glued down on the printed papers.  There ended up being a little extra time in most classes so I let them have the "bonus step" of adding some sand (yes, REAL SAND) to their artwork.  They get so darn excited about sand... and I do a little, too!  Calling it a "bonus step" seemed to be really motivating.

My schedule can end up being a big mess if I don't change some lessons for classes on certain days.  My Tuesday classes hardly ever miss but days off school tend to be scheduled on Mondays and Fridays.  Labor day was obviously on a Monday so my Monday classes had 1 1/2 class periods instead of 2.  They drew their fish at the end of the first day and colored and printed on the second day.  There was no cutting involved.  Here is a result from one of those classes:

3rd Grade Surrealistic Sand Pictures

Play sand is quickly becoming a favorite art supply for me.  (Check out the Tactile Sand Paintings my 2nd grade students made here.)  I wanted to do a lesson based on my favorite Surrealist painting, one that  hangs out in the shadows of better known paintings like Salvador Dali's the Persistence of Memory. André Masson threw sand onto wet gesso as the means to stimulate an idea.  The shape of the sand suggested an underwater battle scene.  Click on the picture below to read more about Masson's work on MoMA's website.

André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926

I showed the students a PowerPoint about Masson and his automatic drawings and sand paintings to start us off. Next, I passed out supplies and demonstrated the process we would be using.  For the first day, we needed tagboard or sturdy paper, bottled glue, cotton swabs, and sand.  

1. Have students get their glue bottles ready to squirt: give it a shake, lid open, hold it up in the air over the paper, but do NOT squirt yet.
2. Prepare the students.  Tell them they will have 2 seconds to drizzle glue over their paper.  This should be like an automatic drawing.  It works best when the bottle is held over the paper instead of the tip touching like I usually suggest.  The best results come when the glue has an irregular shape- spread out but not just swirls over the whole surface.
3. Drizzle the glue.  Seriously, about 2 seconds is all you need and some students get WAAAY too much glue even in that little time.
4. Put the glue bottles away, no adding to it.
5. Use a cotton swab to gently smear the drizzled glue.  The glue should still look white.  If the glue is spread too thin, the sand will not stick very well and the shape will turn into a giant blob.
6. Sprinkle sand on the wet glue.  Dump extra sand back into sand cups.
7. Let dry.

If students had extra time after cleaning up, I gave them free draw paper for automatic drawing.  If you have never done automatic drawing before, it's pretty simple and a good way to practice skills needed for the second part of this project.  Fill a paper with kind of "scribbled" lines then go back and look for shapes that suggest images.  The students just used pencil for the first part of the automatic drawing and to add details to define their images.

TIP: I use a recycled gallon ice cream tub to hold most of my sand and have found the easiest way to distribute sand is to have a cup at each table.

On day 2, I passed out projects and encouraged the students to try turning their paper different directions to look for pictures that jumped out at them from their sand splotches.  They were allowed to use the whole shape of the sand or part of it, the positive space or negative space.  We used black tempera paint and thin paint brushes to add lines and shapes to create the picture.  As long as the image was informed by the shape of the sand, that was the most important part.  We talked about how things don't always make sense in Surrealism so they were encouraged to keep that in mind.  We had a lot of "_______ in Space"!  After enough detail was added with paint to make the picture clear, I gave the students black sharpie markers to write a title on the front.  I love the titles the students think of on projects like this.

I also had students with extra time write artist statements on the back of their papers.  I wish I could find the exact wording that one of my students used to give his very honest opinion.  To paraphrase it was basically: I hated this project.  I didn't like the sand and glue to make a picture.  Most students really enjoyed it once they let go of it being "perfect" and just had fun.  I will warn you that I had a couple students very close to tears at the beginning of day one.  I made a big deal of telling the class that they were smart enough and creative enough and imaginative enough to "find" their own pictures in their artwork.  (This is where the automatic drawing practice comes in handy.)  I said that the pictures didn't have to look realistic and if they couldn't think of something right away, keep trying or turn it into some sort of made up creature or machine.  When I had 3rd grade boys close to tears, I did offer a little more help.  The other students at the table and I helped point out a few ideas.

Take a look at some more examples below or check out the Artsonia exhibit!