Art at Hosmer

Monday, November 12, 2018

Radial Symmetry Name Designs

To start off the year, 5th grade artists created designs using their name! To begin, we learned about radial symmetry, which is symmetry around a central point. We actually learned about this concept in 3rd grade when we made our color wheel snowflakes.

Next, students folded a square piece of paper into triangles before creating a name design, stretching their letters to fit the triangular shaped space. Some students used block or bubble letters and other students wrote their name using lines. The most important part was making the letters stretch to touch the edges of the triangle, since that helps the letters connect together as they are repeated.

Students then traced over their design with a Sharpie marker and by flipping parts of the paper over each other, were able to trace their original design to repeat it in all the remaining triangles. The large windows in the connector hallway acted as a giant light box!

After they completed this step, students unfolded their paper to see their radially symmetrical name design repeated all the way around. Students then added color to their design using colored pencil.

Students used a technique called gradation, which is the visual technique of gradually transitioning from one color to another. Blending is key to this technique. Students also learned about analogous colors, which are three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel.

Students utilized analogous colors when using gradation to better demonstrate the transition between colors. They also worked hard to cover all of the paper and apply even pressure to their colored pencils to get bright, bold colors. Some examples of our finished radial symmetry name designs are below -- can you see the name of each artist in their design?

Ben S., 5th Grade (Bellis)

Ben T., 5th Grade (Bellis)

Destanie, 5th Grade (Twomey)

Emily, 5th Grade (Twomey)

Evan, 5th Grade (Bellis)

Evey, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Gavin, 5th Grade (Twomey)

Holly, 5th Grade (Domermuth Fantasia)

Isaac, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Kiera, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Kingston, 5th Grade (Domermuth Fantasia)

Lenna, 5th Grade (Bellis)

Mackenzie, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Marina, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Mia C., 5th Grade (Twomey)

Michael, 5th Grade (Domermuth Fantasia)

Pamela, 5th Grade (Domermuth Fantasia)

Pavlos, 5th Grade (Domermuth Fantasia)

Tatiana, 5th Grade (Psychoghios)

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Printed + Painted Cityscapes

We have been continuing our exploration of lines in PK and Kindergarten and connected them together to make shapes. We used paint, but this time we did not use a paintbrush or water cups. Instead, we used a new technique: printing! We learned to make lines and shapes using cardboard.

First we dipped the cardboard into paint, then pressed it onto our paper and lifted it up to make a mark. Dip, press, lift. We noticed that we could connect the lines to make them into shapes, and make different lines by changing the way we put our marks down on our paper.

PK and Kindergarten artists created busy cityscapes, with tall skyscrapers, apartment buildings, hotels, stores, cars, and even people. We had a lot of fun coming up with our own cityscapes, using our printed lines and shapes to inspire our imaginations.

We tried our best to fill up our paper and included the sun, clouds and even helicopters in the sky. Some students chose to create a rainy or stormy day in their city.

The following class, we added color using tempera paint. We thought about how to make our colors bright to fill in our shapes, making sure to get plenty of paint on our paint brush, as well as fill in the background. Take a look at some of our printed and painted cityscapes:

Annie, Kindergarten (Segreve)

Charlotte, Kindergarten (Bolton)

Colby, Kindergarten (Mattson)

Elyse, Kindergarten (Beatty)

Hudson, Kindergarten (Segreve)

Jeremiah, Kindergarten (Bolton)

John, PK (Martignetti)

Leo, Kindergarten (Mattson)

Lia, Kindergarten (Tan)

Matthew, Kindergarten (Beatty)

Nareg, Kindergarten (Blackwood)

Shriya, Kindergarten (Segreve)

Zoha, Kindergarten (Tan)

Friday, October 26, 2018

Printing Robots

1st grade students recently created printed robots, using cardboard and recycled materials to print or stamp paint on paper. Many students connected this to the cityscape prints they made as Kindergarten students!

To print, we dipped the cardboard into the paint, then pressed it down on the paper and lifted it up to make a mark. We connected out lines together to make shapes to form our robot's body. We focused on four different shapes that we have learned about: square, rectangle, circle and triangle. As a challenge, artists had to include all four shapes in their artwork at least once!

We thought carefully about what different parts we wanted to add to our robots and what shapes might work best. Students also focused on using the whole paper for their robot and making their robot nice and big!

After our printed robots dried, the following week students used oil pastel to add color to their robot. This year we got some new metallic oil pastels, which added some shiny metallic color to our artwork! We focused on the robot's body and experimented with layering and blending oil pastel colors together.

We also talked about what our robots could do. Some of the robots help with homework and chores, cleaning and tidying rooms, protecting people, gathering information and making our favorite dinners!

After we were done with our robots, we shared our artwork with a partner during a turn & talk. We shared our robots jobs with our partners and also swapped artwork and were able to identify the four different shapes in our partner's artwork. Here are some of our robots and their special jobs, below: