Mouse Paints

Mouse Paints

What happens when 3 curious white mice find three jars of primary colored paint?  They turn it into Mouse Paint!  When the mice begin to dance, their feet mix the colors until new (secondary) colors are created!

Kindergarten students read the story, Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh and then applied their tracing, finger painting, color mixing, cutting, and gluing skills to create vibrant primary and secondary color compositions of mice in puddles. 

Geometric Abstraction

Geometric Abstraction is when simple shapes of many colors come together to create a vivid and visually exciting work of art.  

Kindergarten students examined some examples of geometric abstraction and created their compositions using triangles.  
They were careful to place different colors next to one another to create contrasting color blocks and interesting color combinations.

Mmmmmm......Donuts!

Ever wanted a delicious donut to last forever?  Well, these do!  

First grade students hand molded and detailed donuts out of clay.

Once they were fired they were carefully glazed and embellishments were added before they went on display.  You can find them in the display cases!

Seashell Contour Line Drawings

Have you ever tried contour drawing? It's created when you put your pencil on the paper to draw a picture and you can't pick it up until the picture is finished. 

It's very challenging, but these second grade students took on that challenge and created some amazing sea life inspired drawings!

When they completed their drawings they traced them with marker and filled them in with chalk pastel. 

Students used liquid watercolors to spray paper for the background.

Clay Darumas

Fourth grade students created Darumas, a Japanese good luck talisman, out of clay.  Students were instructed to think of a reason either they, or someone they care about, might need a little luck in their lives. 
They created a theme for their daruma around this need.  Darumas originated as a Japanese talisman of good luck.

Their armless and legless design is inspired by the story of the Bodhidharma, a Zen priest.  The daruma represents determination in achieving your goals, seen also in the non-toppling design (darumas wobble, but they don’t fall down). 

Daruma dolls are often depicted as wearing red robes, because this is the color worn by the Zen monks who have achieved the highest level of spiritual attainment.  

Students exercised their artistic license and created animal, sport, and other unusually themed darumas.

James Rizzi City

James Rizzi was 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.”


Fifth grade students created their own Rizzi inspired buildings representative of themselves. They chose a favorite color as a backdrop of their building, designed 8 symbols that represented them as individuals, and creatively embellished their work with a piece of metallic paper they were challenged to use to enhance their designs. Their goal was to create a building that when displayed, people would be able to guess who's was who's without the aid of name labels.

Special Ravinia Art Exhibit!

 This summer, The First Bank of Highland Park graciously shared it's walls with not only Ravinia School, but Ravinia Music Festival too!  Ravinia School and the Ravinia Music Festival collaborated on a special exhibit at the First Bank of Highland Park to bring awareness to Ravinia Festival's special program, KidsLawn.  Ravinia students Miranda, Rayane, Mark, Lily, Ben M., Kayla, Sydney, and Isabella's work was exhibited.  The Bank is located at 1835 First Street, Highland Park, IL.

About KidsLawn:

KidsLawn  is a new family-friendly space on the north lawn is the perfect place to lay out a picnic and let the kids run between interactive exhibits, including large-scale percussive instruments on which they can make their own kind of music. KidsLawn will also feature stories, videos and our classic “instrument petting zoo.”

Did you know; 

1,600 tickets distributed to Highland Park students and families to attend Ravinia Music Festival. 

900 students in Highland Park receive workshops.

What do art and music have in common?  It's astounding when you compare the commonalities between the use of movement, line, color, and tone in both visual and audio compositions.  Wassily Kandinsky's use of line, color and movement inspires the works you see before you.  Students listened to jazz while creating their visual compositions.  If you look carefully, you may be able to recognize hints of musical symbols such as notes and rests or parts of musical instruments.
This student art project was inspired by the new Ravinia initiative;  KidsLawn.