Marcos Masks

A favourite year 5 class made these striking masks around 2 years ago, I'm more than a little late posting – and yes, I did just say favourite! ; )

We began with pencil, then used permanent markers and finished with some water colours. The masks are inspired by a Hallmark greeting card illustrator named Marcos Roman. I know this because I pretty much verbatim, used Don's excellent lesson on his always inspiring blog Shine Brite Zamorano.

Fantastic Fauvist Foxes

"Fantastic Fauvist Foxes" says it all really... This 3/4 composite class were mid way through Roald Dahl's classic Fantastic Mr Fox. We began by following a guided drawing lesson from Kathy at Art Projects For Kids. After starting in pencil we then traced in permanent marker. Taking inspiration from the bold and non realistic colours of Fauvism, students completed their foxes with water-colour paints.

Textured Landscapes

Year 6 sketched the bones of these stylised and vertically-orientated landscapes in pencil and then traced over these with black textas before adding different repeating patterns in each section. The students used a combination of coloured pens, textas and pencils to achieve the textured appearance. 

This is a lesson I copied verbatim from Miriam at artescuola.com - it's one of my favourite blogs! I showed the children the work of Miriam's students on the other side of the world, which really helped to capture their attention. Some students copied the scenes they saw there, others were inspired by examples I made on the board and some created their own altogether.

Musical Moments Inspired by Paula Cox

These musical moments were made after year 4 observed this series of album covers created by British artist Paula Cox. The students created their own scenes in pencil, then traced the "good bits" with permanent markers before finishing with watercolour paint.

I like the variety of responses from the students and I think they have captured the emotion and simple joy of music much like Paula has. I always keep this lesson up my sleeve as a relief teacher, you can read more about the lesson process on my inaugural "Musical Vibes" post here. Another post featuring more oil pastel variations can be found here.

Paula Scher-inspired NZ

These collaboratively made maps of New Zealand were inspired by American graphic designer and artist, Paula Scher. Year 3 viewed a collection of her beautiful map art here. The land mass of NZ is made up of hand written words all to do with ‘Aotearoa’ (Maori for Land of the Long White Cloud). The children took turns copying from a word bank of around a dozen words with permanent markers. Originally there was a light pencil outline to guide the writing which was later erased. The writing wasn’t particularly legible but the overall effect is great! 

I really like art that looks great on the wall at a distance but also seems to have laser beams that drag you in for a close-up look. It’s interesting to see all the different writing and words and the ways they zig and zag and tumble over each other.

The black and white one is my personal favourite and is inspired by New Zealand’s national sporting colours. The teacher of this particular class was on leave to compete in a hockey tournament in New Zealand so it seemed like a good opportunity to combine a quick geography lesson with some art. Apologies to any Kiwis reading this who have zoomed in close and feel that our word bank is stereotypical or too limited! In the future I would really like to try this lesson with an older class and let each student choose a country to research and make a Scher-like map of art for.