5th Grade

5th grade did some work with abstraction and color theory with these watercolor trees.  They were inspired by Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian.

Before we started the tree paintings, we made a basic color wheel.  Students mixed their primary (the circles) and secondary colors (the squares) together to create intermediate colors (the triangles).

When they painted their trees, they were reminded to use colors that “got along well.”  Their color wheel helped with that task.

Though students used the same subject matter and technique, each tree was different and unique!  Art is cool like that 😎

5th grade also looked to Wayne Thiebaud with this lesson on value.  They needed to create a light, medium, and dark value with only their pencil for the outside of the cake.

For the inside of the cake, they chose one color along with black to create a value scale of their chosen color.

And finally, we run into Roy Lichtenstein again through the use of onomatopoeia.  Onomatopoeia words are ones that sound like the thing they are describing.  Words like meow, boom, bang, zing, and quack!

Their word had to be done in block or bubble letters.  Students were allowed to use whatever colors they wanted for this project.  After 4th grades’ cityscapes, I did not want to see red, blue, and yellow for a while.  Hehe.