Even the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has Blackhawk fever!

Planting a Rainbow at Lincoln School

 Spring is here!  There are so many types of flowers and they all have their beginnings as either seeds or bulbs.  Lois Ehlert's book, Planting a Rainbow, provides a rudimentary explanation of how flowers grow.  
In art, we used her book to demonstrate the color wheel through different floral compositions.  Look closely and you'll see how students arranged their flowers in ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) order.  They carefully drew, traced and cut out their flowers to create a variety that echoed Ehlert's illustrations.  They are currently on display in the main hallway.

Rizzi City

Rizzi is a legendary pop art artist from New York. Born 1950 in Brooklyn.

He created step by step his own colorful world, full of happy pictures, which spray a vision of happy lifetime and joy.  

“Much of my work is about New York City, but above all it is about the people, about how they live. 

New York is a multicultural society where people with all kinds of cultural backgrounds, religions and languages are living together in harmony. 

In my work I want to portray the positive side of New York, I want to show how privileged we are to have such a rich and diverse society and that living together in such a community can be a lot of fun.”

James Rizzi video

Matisse Windsocks

In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair.  However, Matisse’s extraordinary creativity was not be dampened for long. “Une seconde vie”, a second life, was what he called the last fourteen years of his life. Following an operation he found renewed  and unexpected energies and the beautiful Russian-born assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, to keep him company. 

Vast in scale (though not always in size), lush and rigorous in color, his cutouts are among the most admired and influential works of Matisse’s entire career.  By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career.

We applied the concept of cutting paper to make shapes found in Matisse’s famous cut paper compositions.  The composition was rolled and turned into a windsock to prove that art can take on many forms and functions – some as whimsical as the works Matisse drew with his scissors!

Michael Hall: Author Visit

On March 7, Michael Hall the author of My Heart is Like a Zoo and Perfect Square, visited our Treehouse and shared his book, It's an Orange Aardvark!  To welcome him to our school, we read My Heart is Like a Zoo and Perfect Square and created some artwork inspired by his illustrations.  

Kindergarten students used painted scraps of paper to cut and design environments for their animal pictures.  Their children had to include at least one heart in their animal composition, just like Michael Hall's pictures.  The created homes, forests, and other environments with additional scraps.  Finally, they shared a narrative of their composition to help the viewer appreciate the context of their image.

Jackson Pollock Birdies

 Eva Crawford is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina.  She loves to work with mixed media and teaches high school art.  Her 3 little birds, like the Bob Marley song, sit waiting on her doorstep!

Students sponged and splatter painted a large piece of paper in the style of Crawford and Jackson Pollock.  Later, we cut them into bird shapes and gave them beaks, eyes and legs with oil pastels.  They're currently hanging in the main hallway.

Clay Fortune Cookies

Second grade students created beautiful pop art inspired fortune cookies.  They were able to craft the extra large clay cookies after a few practice rounds making small fortune versions.  

Students designed their cookies with a theme which they later applied to their cookie with sharpie and watercolors.  Later, they designed take out containers to match the theme of their cookies.

Lighthouses of the Great Lakes

Lake Michigan has more lighthouses than the other Great Lakes.  It seems like every little town along the shore has a river emptying into the lake, with a lighthouse guarding the entrance.  

Lake Michigan is full of "pier lights", usually found at the mouth of a river.  Students created their own lighthouses using many different techniques.  They applied a value scale with oil pastels, bleeding and blending with watercolors, collage, and acrylic texture painting to create realistic rocks.  They were displayed proudly as a feature for our local history music presentation in April.

Check out this website to learn more about the Great Lakes Lighthouses.

Wayne Thiebaud's Clay Cupcakes

Are our cupcakes making you hungry? Please don't take a bite - you might chip a tooth! Our cupcakes are made from clay the Wayne Theibeau way. 

Theibeau is best known for his paintings of cakes, pies, and desserts. 

They make people nastalgic for home cooked meals and special events with friends and family.

After spending time learning about Theibeau, students filled individual silicone cupcake cups with clay and then added their own personal flair to the top of their cupcakes. 
With talent like this, we're sure to one day see our students on "Cupcake Wars" or opening their own bakery!

Optical Art

Fifth grade students were introduced to the construction of optical art, and the idea that line and color can be used to create illusions in the brain.

They traced their hands and were challenged to draw rounded lines with consistent spacing and thickness to create the illusion that their hands were pressing into “dough” or “foam”. They also learned that warm colors appear to make objects come forward and cool colors appear to make them recede.

Birdhouses

First grade students are ready for spring! In this project they learned about line and pattern and followed specific directions in order to draw, paint and decorate their bird houses. 

They also practiced a shading technique to give depth to their birds’ doorways. In the end, they learned about the power of suggestion and how to turn a picture into a “story with no words” by adding only one feather to their works... just where did that bird go?

Superhero Self-Portraits

It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  No, it’s the second graders! Students studied themselves to create their latest masterpiece-a superhero self-portrait.  They began by reading the story Picture Perfect by the Fletcher Walker Second Graders. 

Students learned how to draw realistic eyes, a nose and mouth.  They used the mirror to "tell" them how to draw their hair.  We studied the art of Roy Lichtenstein and his use of Ben-Day dots for this lesson.  Benjamin Day invented the clever method of creating small dots of primary colors to make multiple colors in comics.  Roy Lichtenstein utilized the BenDay dot idea in his many lithographs.

Students outlined their drawings in black and were required to insert BenDay dots into 3 areas of their picture.  They only used the primary colors, just like Roy Lichtenstein, so they had to be creative with how they colored their pictures.

This project also tested student’s creative writing skills as they described their superhero’s powers, origin, and secret hideout!

Joan Miro Paintings

Third grade students practiced drawing all types of lines; curved, straight, cross hatch, thick, thin and spiral. These works combine line, shape and color in the style of Joan (Juan) Miro, a modern Spanish artist who was famous for his work with line. Students used their spacial skills to create balanced pieces. They also planned ahead as they worked; if they wanted to paint with warm colors, they needed to make their single shape a cool color, and vice versa.

Native American Totems

Fourth grade students learned about totem poles and how they were originally discovered in the Northwest United States and Canada. They learned about their story telling purpose, community importance and witnessed some installation rituals.

Later, the students designed their own totem piece, knowing that they were to be displayed together as a whole. Students planned, cut, layered and assembled the shapes on their pieces. They considered balance, color harmony, tone and color symbolism as it related to the personality or “spirit” of their totem.

Tree Printmaking

Fifth grade students applied the fundamentals of printmaking to create tree bark and leaves for a community project.  After printing, they wrote on apples to express what Ravinia had "given them".  When complete, the prints and apples were assembled to create the "Giving Tree" in our main hallway.

National Art Education Convention 2014!

On March 31, Melinda Donelan (Red Oak art teacher) and I presented at the National Art Education Association's annual national conference.  We met some wonderful people and learned how to expand our profession with workshops and hands-on experiences.  
We gave two presentations;

Contemporary Artists and Augmented Reality: Demonstration of Integration and Creation of Contemporary Art Through Self-reflection

Today’s art educators often revert back to lessons on traditional western masters, because that is what we feel comfortable teaching. Today’s artists experiment with a variety of mediums and settings, as well as working in an environment that is technologically advanced and culturally diverse. 

In this workshop, elementary and middle school teachers were challenged to incorporate contemporary artists in their curriculum. Attendees were provided with lessons that focused on artists such as James Rizzi, a New York-based pop artist; Aminah Robinson, an Ohio-based artist who experiments with found objects; Serene Bacigalupi, a young New York-based artist who recycles old paintings; and additional pop artists, such as Jim Dine and Peter Max. 

Following the background and application strategies, teachers created their own Serene-inspired recycled artwork.

Art and Social Media:  Supporting innovative teaching by incorporating emerging social media into art curriculum.

Social media plays a significant role in the lives of folk and outsider artists. We have access to tutorials, galleries, and live chats with artists through social media.  Pinterest and Etsy have made it easy for artists to share their work, but how can we as art educators utilize these platforms with our students?  Elementary through high school teachers discussed the roles social media plays in art education.  We discussed the relationships between folk and outsider art through social media platforms and how art organizations utilize social media for public attention. Participants shared how modern day access to social media offers the opportunity to use technology to foster a sense of connectedness, in the same way the folk arts connect people to their community and culture.