5th graders are starting the year off with a 3 dimensional project. The students will receive a Powerpoint presentation based on the artwork and life of the artist Keith Haring. Keith Haring was an American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s by expressing concepts of birth, death, love and war. Haring's work was often heavily political and his imagery has become a widely recognized visual language of the 20th century. Haring used lines to create figures that were implied to be moving. He used short lines around his characters to dictate which body parts were moving. Keith Haring was interested in creating his own language through the symbolism of his non-gender specific figures in bright colors with a stark black outline.
Our students will be creating a 3d version of their own Keith Haring inspired figures out of cardboard and plaster gauze. They will be working in groups of 3 or 4 in which each group needs to come up with a theme for their figures in order for them to cohesively relate to one another but can also stand on their own. Keith Haring is very well known not only for his flat 2 Dimensional designs but he had also been commissioned to create huge sculptures of his work as well. (One that you can visit that is still standing today is outside the Schneider's Children's Hospital in New Hyde Park!) 

Here is a video in which the students have watched based on the life of Keith Haring in a documentary series. (2 parts!)

Click here to view the powerpoint the students will receive based on the artwork and life of Keith Haring.

5th Grade is currently creating the cover of their very own, hand made sketchbook! Sketchbooks are like an artists journal or notebook. 5th graders will be utilizing these sketchbooks for taking notes, creating preliminary sketches or drawings and during "free-draw" time. On the cover of these sketchbooks, students have created a drawing of their choosing to decorate their sketchbooks. Some students have created a beautiful abstract drawings by just using colors and lines as their artwork and others have created a representational drawing of something of their choice. Sketchbooks are a great way to store ideas, drawings and notes about artists and artworks that they are learning about to later refer to after leaving 5th grade. 

Learning objectives: Techniques in using watercolors, listening to guided instruction. 

ART WORDS: 
Sketchbook: a journal or book used for ideas and drawings by artists. ​

Welcome back students and welcome to PS31q to any of our new students! I am so excited to get creating in the art room! This year we will be looking even more closely at the foundations of art, the elements of design! We will also look at some of the more difficult foundations that are called the Principles of design. In each lesson we will be learning about a different element or principle as well as learning about some artists too! I can't wait to get messy with you all! ​

To begin, the students will be introduced to the artwork and the life of Paul Cezanne. Cezanne painted a range of different subjects during his career, including: landscapes, still life and portraits.The students will understand the importance of a still life and how to construct a successful composition. They then set up their own still life using autumn inspired objects and create a line drawing using their knowledge of composition. The students then complete a color value chart using pencils and colored pencils. Color value is very important when it comes to drawing images from life. Color value is the technique of using a color from dark to light or light to dark to make make the image look more realistic. Using this technique, students use color value to color in their still life as well as shading to make a 2D image into a more realistic 3D image. They then will use chalk pastels to create a background to the still life drawings. They will then complete a writing assignment in the form of a poem that will describe what the season autumn means to them.

ART WORDS:
Color Value: the range from a color from light to dark
Still life: setting up of items so artists can draw or paint them from life. 

click on the images below to see some of the artwork we studied by Paul Cezanne.

Now that our students are pros at creating one point perspective, they will begin to sketch a landscape drawing that is constructed in one point perspective. Knowing that our students are incredibly creative and imaginative, I decided that these landscapes can be as realistic or as fictional as they would like. Some students opted to stay in the realm of creating a landscape that consists of things they see in real life, others decided to create historical themes they are studying in their other classes and some others decided to use cartoon characters and very fictional subjects as the basis of their landscapes. The only limitation they has was that everything needs to be in one point perspective. We reviewed the artists like Leonardo Divinci, who used one point perspective in his works and the students were also told to take note of when they are driving or walking down the street of how the different buildings and such look around them and then how they look way further away from them. Once their drawing is complete, the students will outline them in black sharpie and paint in their objects using water color. 

Learning Objectives: Art History, One Point Perspective, drawing, painting

ART WORDS: (review)
Vanishing point
Horizon Line
horizontal 
vertical
diagonal 

5th grade students have now been introduced to perspective. Perspective is the art of drawing solid objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other when viewed from a particular point. Have you ever looked far, far down a road and everything at the point of vanishing looks extremely tiny?! Well, when drawing a scene like that, you need to use an artist device called one point perspective. Every line and shape must all angle to one single point to make it look proportionate to the objects around the vanishing point. First the students were given a powerpoint presentation with images in one point perspective. They were shown DaVinci's, "The Last Supper", in which everything was constructed by DaVinci in one point perspective. We also looked at some images in the neighborhood that I took while driving that show one point perspective. To practice drawing this very difficult illusion we started with creating the students names in boxy letters and making them look 3D by bringing each of the points of the letter to one single vanishing point. Although this is actually more difficult than the landscape we will be creating, they will be pro's at this when we start creating our landscapes! 

Learning Objectives: One Point Perspective, using a ruler, mathematics

ART WORDS: 
Vanishing Point: Point at which images appear to vanish. Where all angles of a drawing in one point perspective will all go to this one single point.
Horizon Line:   (also called eye level) marks the point where the sky meets the land or water below. The vanishing point is often on this line. 

FINISHED PRODUCTS! I am incredibly proud of our 5th graders, these are MASTERPIECES! 

This past summer I was lucky enough to visit the city of Barcelona, Spain. On my visit I was able to see, first hand, the beauty of an ancient city with all its absolutely gorgeous architecture. One of the most famous architects of Barcelona is Antoni Gaudí. The students have been given a powerpoint presentation in which they learned about the life and artwork of Antoni Gaudí. In this presentation, I was able to show the students pictures that I took myself while I toured Barcelona. Gaudí's buildings can be seen from a mile away because of their distinct shape, color and beautiful mosaic tiling. They are so very different then the other buildings surrounding them and like I told the students, on the next level of beauty compared to the rest of the architecture in the city. Gaudí had a very particular style, all of his buildings were inspired by nature and he hardly used any hard straight lines. Instead, he used flowing, organic lines. After the powerpoint, the students were put into groups and told they are going to design their very own models of buildings. Over the last month, I have collected many recycled objects including water bottles, toilet paper and paper towel tubes, cardboard, egg cartons and shoe boxes etc. The groups will put these objects together  by taping them to form a building. After their design has been turned into a 3D object, the students will use plaster crafting gauze to cover their buildings and make them into a more realistic form. After the gauze have dried into a hard casting, the students will paint and decorate their buildings using acrylic paint. Finally they will mosaic the outside of their buildings to complete the final stage of this project. Each group also completed a creative writing component of this project by writing a few sentences about their buildings "function". See photos for the writing assignments! 

Learning Objectives:

• How to create a sculpture using recycled objects
• brainstorming and working with a group of other students to create an artwork.
• Architecture and its techniques and processes.
• creating an artwork in the style of an artist.

ART WORDS:
Architecture: both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings and other physical structures.
Blue print: design or plan of the building an architect is creating. 
Mosaic: the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials


Click on the link below to view the powerpoint presentation the students received including images of Antoni Gaudí's artwork.
/uploads/3/9/1/4/39148519/antoni_gaudi.pptx

A BIG THANK YOU TO THE HOOPER FAMILY FOR DONATING TILES TO BE SMASHED TO COMPLETE THIS PROJECT!