1st Grade Overlapping Landscapes

Artwork by Maddie

Overlapping is usually the first way that young artists learn to explore the art element of space. Simply by overlapping elements, the student's flat, two-dimensional drawings suddenly become three-dimensional because one element is clearly in front of (or behind) another!  Suddenly, there's a foreground and background to their drawings!  This is one of those art concepts that's obvious to adults, but it can feel like an epiphany to children.  Our simple landscapes of overlapping hills, each with a tree that blocks the hill behind, is one way we've been learning about space in first grade this month.  (Note: As this was a new lesson for me, I experimented with letting some classes color with paints and others with colored pencils, thus the differences in media in these examples.)

Artwork by Bishop

Artwork by Oceana

Positive Negative Hands

Artwork by Sophia

Third graders have been learning about the art concept of positive and negative space and how sometimes the space around and in between an artwork's main subject becomes an important part of the work.  For an example, students created these giant-sized Valentines card by first tracing their hand and painting a colorful design on a 9x12 sheet of drawing paper. In a second session, they cut their hands from the colorful sheet, and I showed them how to fold these and cut a heart from the center of the hands.  The colored sheet was then glued to one side of a 12x18 sheet of black construction paper, with the cut out hand glued on the opposite side in the corresponding position.  Lastly, the students glued the cut out hearts in the center of their black hands.  The result is a work where the positive and negative spaces of the art are equally important to the overall effect.  Pretty cool!

Artwork by Chloe

Artwork by Jada

Artwork by Lucy