Learning pastels

When I told the kids we were going to begin our drawing with crayons they were not too pleased with me. I drew along with them and drew this rooster. Once they had all of the elements of the rooster drawn then we took out the pastels and began to add color. I worked with them on different ways to spread the color and blend it. We have not previously used oil pastels and the color is fabulous. The roosters were done by the third grade class.

The fourth and fifth grade class were told that they could draw what they wanted to draw for this project and then experiment with using the oil pastels. Subjects ranged from a picture of themselves to penguins and tanks. A couple of them added lots of stars or other design elements. We used both oil and alcohol to promote blending of the pastels. The still think that the alcohol works better for blending.

Painting fruits and vegetable in vivid color

These paintings gave us a great way to talk about colors and use the primary and secondary colors while tying to some of the 1st grade lessons. We discussed making the secondary colors then had to paint a red fruit, an orange one, etc. They did an great job on them too once they thought about what could be which color. I did not get any purple carrots or other odd things this time.

Mouse paint color with Kindergarteners

We are still working on learning about colors and color mixing in the kindergarten. We mixed the secondary colors last week from primary ones and painted a rainbow (and the tables and some of the hands and arms!) 


The book Mouse paint by Ellen Stoll Walsch is just so much fun so we started the class by reading the book then painted the mice and mixed colors to paint the feet and ears. This class went a bit better but we still have a few that just mix everything together in great delight to get a muddy brown. They are a few lessons ahead with the brown. The kids were pretty picky on just what purple looked like as it is the hardest one to get right. Orange was so easy for them. Green took a bit of effort to get enough yellow into the mix.

Monday art includes lots of color

The kindergarten started the day with the books 7 blind mice and "Mouse Paint" learning about colors and mixing colors. They colored the white mice's ears, tails, and feet in the primary colors then made rainbows coming out of the mice's paint brushes. It was a fun project.

The 4th grade created the warm hands in a geometic cool figure. Distinguishing the warm and cool colors was hard until we decided that if the hand was " alive" and therefore "warm" that the colors would be red, orange and yellow. It was easier to do the cool colors as the ones that might be water or grass.