May-June Art Blog Update!

Welcome to the last art blog update of the 2023-2024 school year! We made it!

I hope that you enjoyed seeing all of the students' creations that were sent home! As I tell my students, the process of making their art is just as important (if not more important) than the final product, so hopefully all of the time, effort, and creativity the students put in to their creations was evident! It sure is rewarding to see the students grow as artists over the school year, both in their skill and appreciation of art. I hope they all find some time to do a little creating over the summer, even if it's just a little sketchbook entry on any pages left undone.

Please enjoy the many pictures taken at the end of our art journey this year! Until I see you again, take care and enjoy soaking in the summer sun and precious family time!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Miller 💛🎨

Kindergarten artists completed their Brave Year of First Self -Portraits! The students write down three things they did for the first time in kindergarten. They then had fun making a look a like version of them selves by selecting a hairstyle, hair color, skin color, eye color, and other features that resembles their unique selves :) To finish them off the students made a colorful background with oil pastels and accessorized themselves with extra colored construction paper. Hats and headbands were the most popular accessory!

Mrs. Sheppard's Class

Mrs. Fry's Class

Unfortunately, didn't get a group picture from Mrs. Rocky's class :(

First grade artists finished their Van Gogh Inspired Paper Batiks! The students did a beautiful job drawing their vase of sunflowers, freehand! They then colored the entire artwork attempting to imitate Van Gogh's use of color and texture, while also coloring as hard as they could with the crayons to create a waxy layer. Then came the weirdest part of the project that was a favorite for some and least favorite for others... crumpling up their artwork! The act of crumpling up the art allows the wax to be broken up, giving the paper batik its signature "crackle" effect. We then painted and wipes off watered down black ink over the artwork to complete the batik!

Crumpling up (even stepping on) our batiks!

Beautiful batiks and beautiful girls! :)

Happy camper how to draw on our last day together :)

Second grade artists finished off the school year with a NEW, fun, and quick little artwork... Aboriginal X-Ray Art! We studied the Aboriginal art form that originated in Australia and discovered that some of this type of art making showing the insides of animals, like an x-ray! The students got to choose an ocean animal to draw. We then made our own scratch art, drew and scratch away out animal design (including the x-ray), and then added color! The color was added with oil pastels, paint, and cue tips to make the dot designs. 

2nd grade Aboriginal X-Ray art!

Enjoying looking at all our art creations from the school year before it is packed up to go home :)

Awesome work!

Third grade artists completed their fantastic Felted Tapestries! The students enjoyed learning to wet AND dry felt for the project, in addition to sewing their tapestry on a decorated stick, using the "whip" stitch. Each tapestry and stick design was so unique! Both the representation and abstract/non-representation designs were equally as awesome! The students really enjoyed the unique art style and the fun challenges that came with the project.

Check out these awesome felted tapestries!

Love seeing them all with their creators!

Fourth grade artists blew me away with their incredible Clay Coil Bowls with Sgrafitto Designs! This was a first time attempt at the project that teaches the students such a neat variety of clay making skills. The students became experts at making coils and crafting unique and interesting designs, including "feet" to make the bowl stand level. They then blended the clay on the outside, glazed it while it was in the leather hard stage, scratched away designs ("sgrafitto"), and carefully removed the clay creation from the mold. They are beautiful and functional! :)

Stunning Clay Coil Sgrafitto Bowls!

Front side - back side

AMAZING!!

Mrs. Sherill's class had a chance to finish up the portraits with chalk pastels!

Westlawn 4th graders will be using theirs next year to help with our Artist Inspired Self Portraits!

Fifth grade artists attempted to finish up their Artist Inspired Self Portraits, although some unfortunately ran out of time as the end of the year got busy! While not every project was 100% finished and polished, each student learned so much about their chosen artist, art style, and art media they chose to work with. The project was such an amazing opportunity for the students to make their own choices, take risks, and manage their time... all of which are needed skills as they head to middle school and beyond! Seeing the students make new discoveries and accomplish something they didn't know they were capable of is the reason I love this project so much and use it to end their time creating in elementary art. Now they're off to bigger and better things and will hopefully look back on their years in art with fond memories, and perhaps even bring it full circle with using their love of art in a future career :)

Artist Inspired Self-Portraits in the making. We had a visit one day from Parkview art teacher, Ms. O'Reilly, which was SO fun and helpful!!

Love the variety!

Artists from Mr. Hartling's class

Some Westlawn self-portraits

We would occasionally play a call and response game, "name that artist!" The student would call their artist's first name and the class had to respond with the last name! For the first couple try's there were some goofy responses (like "Alexander - Hamilton" NOPE, "Alexander - Calder" is correct) but they eventually started catching on ;)

5th Grade Fine Arts Night at Parkview!

5th Grade Fine Arts Night at Parkview!

5th Grade Fine Arts Night at Parkview!


That's all for now folks!

April Art Blog Update!

Greetings and welcome back to the art blog! We are in the final stretch of the school year and continuing to produce some of our best work of the school year! Enjoy taking a look through all of the art adventures we've been having! Just ONE more blog update coming your way very soon, ahh! See you then :)

Kindergarten artists completed their Clay Cupcakes with paint, sprinkles, and a coat of mod podge, and are now nearing the end of their Kandinsky Inspired Mixed Media Circles! The Kandinsky project is one of my favorites as it teaches the students SO much and they all turn out so colorful and eye catching!

The students start the project by taking a trip around the art room on the color wheel train by making a stop at each of the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and printing each one! Some old foam building blocks work great to print a square with an empty circle in the middle... a great start for MANY more circles! The next lesson, the students draw and paint circles while having fun exploring lots of color mixing. The students finish off the circles by giving the artwork some tactile texture by gluing on lots of different objects! Some of the objects start as circles (buttons, sequins, pasta, etc.) but others they need to make into circles (yarn, colored paper, pipe cleaners, etc.). When they are done, they have nearly 100 circles added to their artwork!

We are now learning and practicing SEWING for the border of our artwork! The students will soon be adding a whip stitch and running stitch around a frame that will be added for a border of their artwork.

First grade artists completed their BEAUTIFUL Japanese Inspired Kimono Self Portraits! I hope the Mom's enjoyed opening the unique Mother's Day gifts that were crafted with so much time, thought, and care! The students enjoyed using a wide variety of art making methods for this project and the many pieces really came together to make their final masterpiece! Even the frames were inspired by Japanese style art and were created to look ornate and expensive! The students used glue to make the raised areas, then painted black and then gold using the dry brush painting technique.

The first grade artists are now studying artist, Vincent VanGogh for their final artwork of the school year! We read the book "VanGogh and the Sunflowers" and practiced drawing sunflowers with close observation of VanGogh's painting "Three Sunflowers." We will be turning the drawings into a paper batik and can't wait for you to see!

Second grade artists were able to finish their amazing Kente Cloth Inspired Paper Weavings (yes they're made out of paper!) as well as their beautiful hand crafted Clay Picture Frames! I sure hope the recipients of the Clay Picture Frames enjoyed opening the artist's creation and were able to see the creativity and thoughtful design that went into making their frame.

For the Clay Picture Frames, students sketched out a design in their sketchbooks and then practiced making coils with play-dough! Playing with the play-dough was not only fun but allowed the students to get a feel for making coils and a variety of designs. We then experienced the difference when working with the clay, which was more challenging. The clay dries out if water is not added back to it, but can also get sloppy and wet with too much water. The clay is also messy, which some students love and others dislike. It's so great to see the students problem solve and enjoy working with an art medium they don't often use.

Once the clay projects were complete the students glazed with Wonderglaze (a special kind of gloss glaze that can go on clay before it has been fired in the kiln). Thank you so much to the two parent volunteers that helped add the twine to hang up the frames! I couldn't do it all without some amazing parent help!

We are now starting our final artwork... Aboriginal X-Ray Animals!

Third grade artists have enjoyed felting for their latest project. They were able to experience wet AND dry felting! You will see in the pictures below that the students created two sketches and had a choice of a design that was representational, abstract, or non-representational. They then walked through the process of pulling apart wool roving into thin wispy pieces that were layered in different directions. Once the entire area was well covered the students saturated the fibers with soapy water, rolled it up in bubble wrap with a cover liner over top, and rolled MANY times! The friction that was created when rolling allowed the fibers to attach together... SO COOL! 

After wet felting, the students had a chance to experience dry felting using special needles and sponges. We of course stayed safe by using thimbles and cookie cutters to keep our fingers away from the needle. The process of pushing the barbed hooks on the needle through the loose fibers to the background felt caused the fibers to attach together. This creates a fuzzy and hairy texture on the back of the base felt!

We are now have lots of fun decorating sticks that the felted tapestries will be sewn on to! Thank you for helping your child fins a stick to bring in and an extra WAY TO GO to the students that were kind of enough to bring extras for students that forgot. 

Fourth grade artists are absolutely blowing me away with this first time Clay Coil Bowl project! It was certainly an ambitions clay project I wanted to try but they are turning out ah-mazing!! The bowls are constructed entirely of coils over a "mold" (plastic bowls from the dollar store). Once the entire outside is covered with coils the students blend the clay to create a smooth surface that we will use for Sgrafitto! Sgrafitto is an Italian words that means "to scratch." The smooth area of the bowl will be glazed and then with the clay still in the leather hard stage, students can scratch away designs to expose the clay underneath. Once the outside is complete, we will glaze a second color on the inside!

Check out the students enjoying the art making process from start to (almost) finish! We can't wait to show you the completed projects soon, once they have been fired in the kiln! The glazes are food safe, so they can be eaten out of, but should be washed by hand.

Fifth grade artists have completed a favorite project, their Clay Cakes :) Two out of the three schools have experienced their Fine Arts Night, and what a special event that was, and will be for our Parkview students, coming up soon! What a JOY it is to celebrate our students as artists and musicians and all the growing they have down over the years. It has been a busy and exciting time of year for sure! Below you will see two albums from the Westlawn and Thorson Gallery Walk at the Fine Arts Night. Enjoy :)

The fifth grade artists are now in the midst of their final artwork, which is one of my personal favorites... Artist Inspired Self Portrait. This project is one that allows the students a lot of creative freedom to make choices, about their artist/time period/style, art medium and art making process, the size of artwork, 2D vs 3D, so on and so forth. The main goal is to blend the artist's style with their own unique personality, while also learning about and appreciating all that they learn surrounding their selected artist. The students had a list of over 30 artists to choose form and some even selected their own. We even have a student who's great uncle is a processional artist and knew Pablo Picasso! How neat is that?!

We are quickly running out of time, so hopefully we can wrap up this memorable and rewarding project before they walk out of their elementary art room for the last time (although they are always welcome to come back and visit)!! More pictures to come soon of the Artist Inspired Self Portraits! Not many pictures have been taken as I am SO busy teaching and assisting with dozens of different art styles and art making processes, ahh!

Westlawn Fifth Grade Fine Arts Night 2024

Thorson Fifth Grade Fine Arts Night 2024