Brighten up your day by visiting our Local Spotlight Display during the month of March, which features art projects created by Lincoln Elementary School students in Grades K-4. Youth Art Month, which is celebrated in March, is a national program that encourages art education in schools and promotes art appreciation. You will see this year’s theme - Healing Though Color - reflected in the work on display.
We are extremely grateful to art teacher Marta Kozbur for coordinating the display. Ms. Kozbur shared with us the process the students used to create these pieces.
Kindergarten students created the 3-D dragon masks. Students learned about Chinese New Year and how to draw a dragon's face. Students used metallic papers in collages and practiced patterns with gold markers.
Students in first grade created several projects, including the "cave paintings" of imaginary animals that they created after learning about the first painters. Students used cray-pas oil pastels, learned about creating patterns, and signed their work with red handprints.
After looking at works by Seurat, students used dots to create a fall landscape. Winter Birch trees were created with masking tape and by doing a watercolor wash over white cray-pas oil pastels. The effects of salt were seen when they painted their sky with watercolors.
First graders also created their own Chinese Dragons using crayons, cray-pas and a watercolor resist. Students learned about mixing colors by creating their colorful animals using tempera paints and pressing colors between folded paper, opening the paper and looking for animals.
Second grade students started the year with a stamping project and created their flowering gardens.
The next project was an apple project where students learned about composition and over-lapping. Our color studies were done using tempera paint sticks for the background and "swatches" of mixed colors "dashed" on to the background.
This was followed by our "house" project that was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh. Students drew the front of their house with crayons and then "dashed" in with cray-pas. Finally, students created a composition of snowflakes using metallic cray-pas and metallic watercolors.
Students in third grade started the year with their hollyhock flowers. These were created by first painting the stems with green tempera paints. Then, using a plastic newspaper bag as a stamping tool, we created our flowers. Next, students learned to mix primary color cray-pas to create their small color squares. We continued to learn blending techniques with cray-pas when creating our fall spider webs and spiders.
For our next project, I collaborated with the 3rd grade team during their American Indian unit in art. We learned about the origins of corn and created our corn compositions.
In January we “traveled" to Japan. For their kimono paintings, students were inspired by paintings that were donated to our art room. They used acrylic brush markers for their paintings.
Fourth graders started the year with their leaf drawings. Students picked their favorite leaves, drew them and then created a composition of leaves in warm-colored chalks. For their background they used 3 cool colors, starting at the leaf and working their way out.
Our next project focused on the work of Tim Burton. Students learned about grey scale and value, then practiced creating these with pencil. Their next step was to create a self-portrait using Tim Burton characters as inspiration.
The last projects we worked on this year were printmaking and metal work. Students looked at examples of castles and then designed their own. Once their design was ready, they transferred it to a printing plate. After the first print, students added details and printed a second time.
For the metal project, students looked at different dragons and then created their own. After transferring their design to the metal, students learned different techniques for creating textures in the metal.
