yup - we did the positive/negative space lesson! as a standard  for my upper elementary artists- and focused on robert indiana and his iconic love art and stamp. i started with keynote show - always a hit - that i found here.

here's what we did:
1. we watched the awesome powerpoint - i have keynote - and discussed typography and fonts - they loved this discussion and these art talks are just so valuable - to see a thing is different than to speak of a thing or create a thing - all are important!

2. we looked at many examples of positive/negative space and identified them - and many examples of robert indiana art and bio info.

3. then i did 2 or 3 examples of the cut paper method = two colors - contrasting or complimentary - on top of each other - and then cut! directions were to cut either an abstract, tesselation, or object.

4. then they had to pick a different color to mount,  results rocked!

follow up was a robert indiana word lesson....upcoming!

kinder pop art portraits

what a oh-so-fun project this was!

our amazing pre-k / kinder teacher had taken great pics of her class to make silhouette pieces out of black paper for president's day.

she had the pics left - i made black and white copies and brought pastels to class.

together we looked at many pictures of pop art - warhol portraits and photoshop examples of people with fun colors.

what we did:

1) we looked at each black and white photo and discussed where a big area of color could be drawn.
2) then we had an art talk about 'normal' colors for things and 'crazy' colors like skin color and hair color. it was a blast to hear them draw from prior experience and point out 'oompa-loompas' and 'grinch'!

3) after picking face and hair color - we picked background colors - it had to be a complimentary color (previous lesson) and blend it in without diluting (good word) the color

this is my favorite kinder lesson so far!