Welcome to the Jungle! Henri Rousseau Paintings

Third and fourth grade artists studied the painintngs of Henri Rousseau.  We specifically looked at his lush jungle paintings.  They used acrylic paints on canvas board to create jungle landscapes.  We learned about foreground, middle ground and background and we also focused on mixing different shades and tints of green, rather than using the green paint straight from the bottle.

A few of Henri Rousseau's jungle scenes:

Student work:

Rainbow Fish

Kindergarten artists read The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.  

This is a favorite children's story about sharing and making friends.  We drew our rainbow fish with crayons first, using the letter C, D or M to make fish scales.  Then we painted our fish with liquid watercolors and observed the resist technique.  Finally, we used colored foil to add the rainbow scales onto our beautiful fish! 

"I always loved art teachers because they were so bizarre. They were like the homeless people of the faculty -- all disheveled, wearing smocks, covered in paint, always digging through the garbage, looking for bottles and egg cartons and things." -Ted Alexandro

Festive Winter Prints

Third and fourth graders used foam board to create stamps of winter themes.  Some chose to turn their stamps into cards or gift tags.

Winter Watercolor Birds

Poinsettias

Kindergarten, First and Second grade artists created beautiful Poinsettia paintings.  We looked at the flowers to observe the shapes of the leaves and petals.  We used acrylic paints.

                                                FIRST/SECOND GRADE POINSETTIAS

KINDERGARTEN POINSETTIAS

Line Paintings

First and Second grade artists used black acrylic paint to "collect" all of the different types of lines they could think of.  Then they chose two primary colors to mix to paint the background.

Kindergarten Leaf Rubbings