Letter and Number art inspired by Jasper Johns

Beautiful Hands

Kindergarten artists read "Beautiful hands by Kathryn Otoshi and Bret Baumgarten.  They traced their hands and colored them with construction paper crayons, then painted with liquid watercolors in warm or cool colors.  They observed the watercolor resist technique.

Kindergarten Leaf Rubbing Watercolor Resist Paintings

#kindergarten #leaf #watercolorresist #autumnart at #faystonschool

A video posted by Nora (@artclass_allday) on Sep 21, 2016 at 11:51am PDT

Kindergartners explore watercolors

Kindergarten artists learned different tips and tricks for watercolor painting. We set up three stations in our art room, each with liquid watercolor paint. The first station had crayons so that they could experiment with watercolor resist. The second had sharpie markers and the third had salt. The salt station was definitely the favorite, as they loved watching the crystalline patterns emerge on their paintings. We will continue to use each of these techniques in our artwork.

Birds and Birches

First and second graders looked at the beautiful and fun collage illustrations in Lois Ehlert's book "Snowballs."

We used liquid watercolor paint with oil pastel resist to make colorful papers, which we used to cut out our birds. We used sheet music for our birch trees and added shading and detail with black oil pastels. 

Thank you to the art blog www.deepspacesparkle.com for the inspiration for this lesson. 

Inspired by Miroco Machiko

Thank you to Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists for the introduction to Miroco Machiko.  I love her bold, stylized artwork.  The students can really relate to her sense of design and colorful images.  We looked at her picture of vegetables, then used crayon and watercolor resist to create fruit and vegetable pictures.

Here is artwork inspired by Miroco Machiko by first and second graders. This is the piece of artwork that artists in grades one and two will use for their Original Works fundraiser.  

Inspired by Jasper Johns

First and second grade artists looked at the work of pop artist Jasper Johns. We learned that Johns makes artwork that shows everyday symbols and objects, like letters and numbers. We made artwork in the style of Jasper Johns by using letters and numbers and bright colors.