Sunflowers

You will need...

• black relief paint
• chalk pastels
• black paper
• sunflowers for modelling/inspiration
• hairspray

Use sunflowers to practise sketching.  Pencil drawing onto black paper, use black relief paint over this outline. Wait for it to dry. Use chalk pastels to colour and fingers to smudge/blend colours.  When complete, spray over hairspray or similar to set chalk. Leave to dry.

Hundertwasser Inspired Art

Hundertwasser has long inspired art lessons in my classroom. Not only do children relate to his quirky art and architecture style, his musings on environmental issues are relevant and create a great platform for art projects.

"When we dream alone it is only a dream, but when many dream together it is the beginning of a new reality. "     

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

After studying Hundertwasser, and discussing key features of his architecture and art such as his use of domes, windows and colour; we used black vivid to outline our pictures and watercolour pencils to colour.

Christmas Stained Glass Windows

• black paper
• oil pastels

All credit to Amy for this idea, lesson details can be found here.

Typography

Lesson Outline

• Students take a head and shoulder photo of themselves (or get friend/teacher to)
• Import it into this free Crayola App draining the colour from the photo so you are left with black and white image.
• Print and enlarge to fit on A3 sheet.
• Tape onto window with good quality blank sheet of A3 over the top so that image underneath can be seen and traced.
• Lightly trace outlines with pencil
• Students brainstorm 10 words that best describe themselves (encourage them to use a thesaurus to find interesting words).
• In pencil first, students copy the words onto the outline of the image and repeat the list of words until all lines are covered. Smaller words can be used for fine details. 
• Encourage students to use block letters or at least consistent letter shape. 
• Words can be drawn smaller/finer depending on the detail (see examples) 
• Supply students with a selection of fine black Sharpies or similar of differing sizes.
• Carefully retrace over all your words in black pen it is time consuming but the end product is worth it! I did this project with Year 6 students. 

Wire Sculptures

I don't believe we utilise wire in art enough! Our art topic this term is sculpture, and living in a city that values public sculpture we are lucky to be able to visit the city and get up and personal with some wonderful art. Check out the Wellington Sculpture Trust website here

There are some wonderful examples online of wire portraits that I made into a slideshow for my initial student motivation lesson. Second lesson I simply gave each student some wire and pliers and told them to 'create' (preferably without poking anyone's eyes out!)

We then moved on to looking at faces and how best to 'connect' the wire, learning through trial and error that the less pieces of wire used the better.  I was initially going to display the finished products on a wooden plinth or hang them, but they ended up being more effective against black paper.  What the photos don't show is that they are quite 3 dimensional and stand out from the paper.  The students surprised themselves, having been quite daunted with the task to begin with!

Picasso Cubist Guitars

So many great places online to find inspiration for these! Look here or here

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