Monday, April 25, 2011

1st Grade O'Keeffe inspired flowers

Perfect for Spring, I thought it'd be nice to have my first graders do some O'Keeffe inspired art. Heavily revisited in art education, particularly at the elementary level, O'Keeffe's bold and vibrant flowers are almost always used at some part in everyone's art curriculum, and almost always, with the finished results producing beautiful childrens art. To help prove my point, here are a few images I found by simply google imaging the words 'O'Keeffe art lessons for kids':




To add to the repertoire of O'Keeffe inspired lessons I decided to try my own by using Elmer's glue on white paper. I found the trick to making this lesson work was making sure the glue lines were really thick and by having the students outline the inner and outer edges of the dried glue with a black sharpie. Doing this gave the work a more polished look. Initially I was going to have the students leave the backgrounds white, but I changed my mind last minute and had them add at least 3 different designs (after going over what a design is with them) in 3 different colors to their piece. I love the results!







Friday, April 15, 2011

Kurt Schwitters and Romare Bearden-2 links to check out

Here are a few links to two articles written in the NY Times. The first is about Kurt Schwitters and the second is about Romare Bearden. Both artists have exhibits currently running around the NY area.



'Versatile Collagist, Dangerous Times'

Princeton University Art Museum





'Vision of Life, Built from Bits and Pieces'

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Tilt-Shift Photography-not what you may think...




I was intrigued after seeing a post by fellow blogger 'Fine Lines' and her tilt-shift Van Gogh.

Tilt-shift photography is defined as "the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the shallow depth of field s simulated with digital postprocessing; the name may derive from the tilt-shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically."

Selective Focus: used to direct the viewer's attention to a small part of the image while de-emphasizing other parts.
tilt-shift lens:or a perspective control lens allows the photographer to control the appearance of perspective in the image
I don't normally advocate for Wikipedia too much, but they have a pretty good amount of resources on this topic.
Source from: Wikipedia

So, basically it's photo's that are made to look miniature, withouth really being miniature at all! They're a total trip! LoVe It!

Here's a great site with tons of examples and the name of the artist who took the images:

SmashingMagazine