Gimme some cupcakes!

Raise your hand if you love cupcakes! ✋🏼 That’d be me! I love some cupcakes and so do the kids. They will love drawing these awesome Wayne Thiebaud inspired pieces. I’ve made these with my second graders before but I enjoyed putting a fun new spin on it with the painted paper background and the black construction paper shadows. 

Step by step instructions coming soon. In the mean time, this is the awesome video I shared with my students prior to the making of the background. Thanks, Deep Space Sparkle!

A Couple of Cute Cockerels!

Kindergarten’s painted paper turkeys. We read the book ‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving as well and they loved it. I loved it too since it was a tale of daring animal rescue. 😉 It has several art references in the illustrations and a great quote from Van Gogh: “…what is done in love is done well.”

First Grade Huipils

First graders are making the traditional piece of clothing, the huipil, for their Cinco de Mayo inspired art!

¡Cinco de Mayo!

I’m trying all new projects in honor of the upcoming celebration of Cinco de Mayo. It involves lots of painted paper, printmaking, and collage. Every grade has a project they are going to be working on in the coming weeks so I’ll be sharing as we go. Check out some of our prep work.  Lots of these ideas are coming from the awesome art blog, Painted Paper.  She did an entire art show on art from Mexico.  Beautiful ideas!

Play that funky music, Picasso!

It’s time for my third graders to learn about Picasso and all of his guitars and then make one of their own with painted paper. …maybe I should have called this post Picasso’s Painted Paper Pickers.

Art Journal: Dia de Los Muertos

Fifth graders are going to turn themselves into calaveras for Dia de Los Muertos. We are starting this week so I’ll post pictures when we are finished. Here’s my example, step by step.

After I took my photo with Photobooth, I cropped it in pretty close, edited it to make it much brighter and then printed it out as a 5×7.

Draw on the colorful decorations. They usually include circles or flowers around the eyes and the holes on the nose like a skull.

After gluing my face into my journal, I used painted paper to make flowers to go around my face. Another option would be a black top hat with a flower in it.

The last step is to use a sharpie – I used a metallic gold because my page was a dark brown – and add lots of designs, kind of like zentangles.

Here are some student examples. I love how they are turning out. Some of them are also learning the valuable lesson of *less is more*.

Fall Leaves Radial Design

Our next art journal entry includes warm colors, painted paper, radial design, and fall leaves. We painted a page in our books black and while that dried, we painted three strips of white paper with reds, oranges, and yellows in different textures and patterns. Then we cut out small leaves and arranged them in a radial pattern and glued them down. They are turning out vibrant and beautiful!

Kids examples!

Alphabet Webs

It will soon be that spooky, fun holiday that shall not be named! To get into the spirit, First Graders will be making Alphabet Spiderwebs!
We start with writing the alphabet all over a black piece of paper with a white construction paper crayon. Then we connect all the letters to each other to resemble a web. Then we use some painted paper to make our spider. I just used some crayons and glitter to add eyes and a mouth.
I added the frame as an after thought but it would probably be better to do that first so you don’t cover up any letters.

More Story Laboratory

Some more projects that my kids have been working on to help decorate the Story Laboratory-themed book fair…

Bugs & Beakers!

Mad scientists are on the loose!!!

Third Grade ROCKS!

This beautiful project came from over at Painted Paper of course. The kids absolutely loved making the guitars and they really turned out so fantastic. I don’t think there was one “bad” one in the whole class. It took us two class periods. One day to trace the guitars and paint the paper and then the next class we cut them out, added the “holes”, strings, and tuners. We also painted a little outline around the body of the guitar.