Olympic Action Prints

It's a messy time in the art room- one of my favorite things is printmaking!  The kids love it, and with an organized set up and routine, it does not have to be a crazy mess.  Since we've been using The Olympics as a theme in 3rd grade art, after the kids made their statues, I had them make an incised plate on a piece of Styrofoam.  I go ahead and buy the trays through the art catalog.  They can be pricy, but they work.  And to save a bit, I chop 'em in half.  When I'm feeling really cheap, I save them after the projects to use as paint trays and such.  That aside- each student drew one person, in an olympic pose.  Then, we broke out the red, white and blue- except I didn't have as much white as I thought, so we ended up using white paper for those that wanted the Americana effect.  Curriculum states in MNPS that the 3rd graders will do a collograph print.  And, this is incised.  I intend to have them collograph a background image- I've never done a double print project, and I'm not sure how it will turn out, but ya never know until you give it a go.  So, here's step one.  And, hopefully, the next thing you'll see is a double print posting.

Action Drawings (1st Grade)

This one loved the action lines

The 1st graders  have been loving the work of Keith Haring.  After doing the "cut outs" which I showed in a previous post, we continued our look at his work with action drawings.  Here are a couple fun ones.

Keith Haring Action People

This past week was Jump Rope for Heart, and I usually try to do some sort of activity that relates- something where we look at action.  And, in my really good years, I make it down the hall to hang the pics around the PE room.  This year, I brought in the work of Keith Haring, and the 1st graders and I talked about contrast, along with action.  The students were in love with his bright colorful images, and had a lot of fun with his work.  We each drew and cut a large shape of a person in action.  After a review of contrast, students chose a color that would help their person stand out, and glued it down.  The extra fun was black glue to trace and add action lines.  After this project, we began to work on our drawing of people, and I'll post those fun pics soon. 

Rescuing the 2nd grade project

The second graders were to cut their silhouettes out of tissue paper, and then paste them to the snowy background. Oh, the best laid plans. My second graders got lazy, and didn't cut as well as they had drawn and traced their people. So, we ended up with wiggly blobs. After they were dry, I had them trace their athletes with markers, to re-define the shape, and we used some letters that had been donated to the art room to spell out action words. This helped to break up the space of the picture, as well as re-enforced some language skills.