Day 1 Annie Painter Art Institute

Annie Painter's workshop has rave reviews. When it was offered in my school building this summer I decided to check it out! Imagine my surprise when my colleague and friend Lori S. also came, as well as my  fellow teachers Nancy M., Erin O and Wind L! Day One was packed with activities, hands on learning, exploring with tempera paint on butcher paper and learning to identify the elements and principles of art. Here are some of the photos to show you how MUCH we made today!

Here is the entire class, sporting the folk inspired headdresses we made out of construction paper. We explored the use of positive and negative shape in this project and had to use up all the scraps we created in the process!

The Rules of the Road for an art classroom

The Struggling Artist Masterpiece Project

We didn't know what the project was to be...but we thought the tempera paint looked pretty dried out....
turns out that was intentional. The little pools of semi-dry tempera behave more like pots of watercolor, the idea behind this is that students will be less likely to make a muddy green mess of paint (more likely to happen when using wet tempera). I think using smaller brushes than the 1.5" chip brushes we used would help.

Nonobjective painting only....what happens when you simply explore the possibilities of paint, paper and brush.




Nothing representational allowed. We painted in our own 'space' for awhile, then began to move around the paper, adding to areas where others had painted. Then we were given slips of paper with the elements and principles of art typed on them and as a small group we looked for areas within our section of painting that best fit the word.

Finally, black mats were handed out and we 'framed' in our masterpiece, briefly talking about composition. Voila!

Masterpieces!

 

NON OBJECTIVE PAINTING

Our next project was based on the work of Wassily Kandisky, considered the father of abstract expressionism. He grew up with musical parents and had the ability to associate colors with sounds (a synesthete, I believe). He believed that a new form of communication was possible simply by using color and shape, a sort of symbolic manner of communicating meaning. His work certainly expresses emotion!

We made a background gradient wash using only one color

 I think this painting is exquisite

Lori's gradient with blue tape resist

Lori's elegant masterpiece

my gradient with some blue painter tape pieces for resist

my finished painting inspired by Kandinsky