Picasso Relief Portraits

When I went to my state’s art education conference this fall, I saw a really cool project idea at the United Art booth. It was bright, colorful, and a relief sculpture! You can find it here. They gave me the lesson plan for it and I have been working on the sample for my students. I’ve taken pictures of most of my steps so that I can share with my students when they are ready to make it. Feel free to use it. 🙂 I started with painting the background piece of cardboard (8×10″).

Then I drew out my main head shape, painted it white, and cut it out.

Glue some smaller pieces of cardboard to the back and then glue it down to your background.

Create a profile view of just the head – not the nose, eyes, etc.

I painted another piece of cardboard white and then drew out the rest of my main pieces – eyes, lips, nose, forehead. I also added cheeks, eyebrows, and lids. The more pieces you add, the more interesting it can be.

I used my scraps from cutting all my other pieces to create the hair and neck. Now it’s ready to paint!

I painted with tempera and let it dry before using some black lines to add some depth and really make it pop!

I love this project and can’t wait to try it with my 6th graders!

UPDATE! We completed this assignment and the results are awesome! Check ’em out:

So proud of these!!

Picasso, Primativism, Paint, and Pastels

I saw this project on A Glimmer of Light and decided it would be a fun project to do with my 5th graders. They get so caught up in making things realistic and perfect, this project encourages them to do just the opposite and let the funky chicken out. And while we were working on these, I remembered another chicken project I have done with Kindergarten and thought it would be a great time to review color-mixing with them and then hang the Kinders’ and the 5th grader’s work together!

First the 5th grade work:

Are these not hilarious?! I love them and the kids loved them too.

Here are some kinder-chickens.

  
And here is the final bulletin board with bothe grade’s artwork!

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.

Let’s be FRANK: Picasso Rocks!

Saw this project on Art Projects for Kids and thought it would be a festive way to discuss Picasso with my second graders. They have totally loved looking at his crazy Cubist paintings and then making their own version of Cubist Frankenstein.
We drew their Frankie with sharpie and then colored it all in, including some spooky things in the background. The original plan was to look trough magazines for the eyes but it was near impossible to find eyes big enough to go on the monsters. I ended up doing a google search for “eye” and just printing the results. It worked out well.
Check out some of our finished pieces!

Share this:

Mr. Picasso Head

SUPER COOL!!!  How have I missed this?  I love this Mr. Potato Head-esque game where you create a “painting” a la Picasso and you can save it, print it, and/or share it.  I love it!!! 

First Grade Gets The Blues…

And the happies! : ) The last couple of weeks, I have been discussing Picasso and his “periods” with the first graders. We compared and contrasted with paintings from each period and had some interesting discussions about how people used to dress and, it never failed, any time I said, “Picasso fell in love,” kids would fall out of their chairs, totally disgusted. Highly entertaining.

After we recovered from the discussions of feeling sad and then happy, we created our own Blue Period portraits and Rose Period portraits. These are some of the results!

Guernica Gets A Check-Up

The globe-trotting painting is getting a thorough examination for it’s 75th Birthday! Click on the photo to check out the full article!

Photo courtesy of AP

Blue Man Group

Saw this post on Pinterest last night (I mean, really, what did we do before Pinterest???) and I can’t wait to do it with my kids! It’s from There’s A Dragon In My Art Room and it looks like lots of fun. It will also be a nice move from my recent discussion of Picasso’s Rose period that we had for our Valentine’s Day Rose Period Hearts Project.
I will for sure be posting these ASAP!

Picasso Hearts

I came across this lesson on Deep Space Sparkle who gives credit to Painted Paper’s post about Picasso’s Rose Period Hearts. The lesson is pretty simple but the kids loved the freedom of painting any kind of line, shape, or pattern on their hearts. We took the time to fold our paper and cut our own hearts and they did beautifully. No broken hearts in this first grade class! 🙂 I shared with them the examples on DSS’s page and Painted Paper’s too. I’ll be posting pictures of their finished pieces next week! In the mean time, here is my example. Happy ❤ making!