Baden Lower School Art Report

Baden Lower School Art – June Update by Anne Rieser Pre-School and Pre-K have completed their Claude Monet inspired project. There is now a beautiful lily pond outside their classroom. To coincide with their Unit, Caring for Living Things, we discussed the life cycle of the frog and included tadpole eggs, tadpoles and a few frogs. This is a great project with impressive results.

PS/PK and Grade 1 recently looked at the artwork of Piet Mondrian. This project provided an opportunity to divide space with bold black lines and to learn about and review the primary colors: red, yellow and blue.

Grade 1 took a closer look at trees and determined that the letter Y can often be found in the dividing tree branches. With this newly gained knowledge we painted Y-trees and later printed foliage with sponge stamps.

Grade 2 completed their Big Mouth Fish. Those big mouths have a functional purpose too. These fish love to eat paperclips, rubber-bands, and other small office supplies. They make a fabulous greeting committee in the Art room.

Near and far. We considered different ways artists can create depth in their paintings and concluded that the size and details of objects, in this case trees, play a role. We painted our own landscapes and tried to achieve visual distance, quite successfully.

Grade 3 and 4 Pop artist, Wayne Thiebaud influenced many of our projects during the second half of the semester.

He is known for his paintings of desserts, pies, cakes and sweets. It’s hard not to be motivated by food, especially desserts. We learned about creating visual volume by employing tints and shades.

Students used oil pastels to draw layer cakes.

Maintaining the influence of Wayne Thiebaud, we made ceramic cupcakes. We pinched, rolled, scored, slipped and coiled the clay to form functional cupcake boxes. Take a look at our Art Bakery.

Grade 5 has finished their one-point perspective drawings. Relevant terminology: horizon line, vanishing point, horizontal and vertical, and parallel lines.

Grade 5 started Alberto Giacometti sculptures recently and will paint them during our last lesson next week. I can’t wait to see them with a bit of color.

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