Picasso: Blue Guitars

This was a really fun project to teach value and mixing tints and shades.  2nd graders learned about Pablo Picasso and looked at his abstract guitar sculptures and collages. Then they built guitar sculptures out of poster board.  The next time we focused on Picasso's 1903 painting The Old Guitarist. We discussed how Picasso conveys feeling of sadness through the painting.  Then students learned how to mix their own tints and shades of blue to paint their guitars.  The next time they added Sharpie lines and patterns.

                                   

Atmospheric Perspective

   Finally a chance to update my blog!  I have a student teacher hard at work and I thought I would use this time to post work we did at the end of last school year then I can focus on this year.
  At the end of the year 4th graders did these landscape paintings with tints and shades.  After looking at real life examples of this natural occurrence students drew layers of a landscape, then mixed value from lighter to darker. You can find more scientific information including how Leonardo DaVinci used atmospheric perspective at http://legacy.mos.org/sln/Leonardo/InvestigatingAerialP.html.