Welcome 7th grade! Zentangle Animals

We are currently wrapping up week two of the new school year. We are almost done completely our first project, Zentangle Animals. We have had a some great experience in class with watercolor techniques as well as creating complex patterns known as Zentangles. This project focused on the Studio Habits of Develop Craft, Envision and Reflect. Beautiful work 7th grade!

Techniques we covered in class:
Graded wash
Wet in wet
Dry brush
Blotting
Scraping
Rubbing alcohol
Resist
Salt 

Reflecting Architectural Printing

We have been spending a lot of time this quarter drawing, printing and sculpting architectural structures. We started with our reflection watercolor prints of famous architectural wonders and then moved onto large-scale paper mache Gothic cathedrals. Photos to come soon!

Zentangle Watercolor Animals

Update: Check out the Art of Ed's post today about watercolor techniques. We used many of these techniques in our lesson.

What could be better than intense color, rich pattern and funky animal drawings? Well...if you add a QR code that shares a recorded student reflection with who ever scans it, that will top it!

Here is the outline of our most recent work- Zentangle Watercolor Animals (with QR code reflection)

1. Begin with demo of/practicing watercolor techniques

The techniques we focused on were:

• Dry Brush
• Wet-in-wet
• Rubbing Alcohol
• Salt
• Scrape
• Crayon Resist
• Wash

Great video demos here if you need a refresher on basic watercolor techniques.
 
2. Practice drawing a large scale animal or animal head. Outline in Sharpie- remember to vary the thickness of the lines! 

3. Break up the animal shape with lines to create multiple spaces. Paint various watercolor techniques within the spaces.

4. Draw Zentangle patterns over the dried paint spaces. Discuss why it's important to put contrasting patterns next to each other. 

5. Use Croak.It! app to record a 30 second reflection about art making process. The questions we answered were as follows:

6. Use QR Code Maker app to turn the Croak.It! recording into a scan-ready QR code. Print and post on completed artwork.

Students enjoy all the aspects of this project- especially practicing all the various watercolor techniques. Adding the QR code was a nice way to wrap up the work and reflect in an unconventional way.

Watercolor Landscape Collages

Watercolor paint is one of our favorite mediums at BMS. No matter how often we use it in class, students are intrigued by the endless possibilities.

I usually start of our watercolor introduction with a series of stations so students can explore the options. Wet-in-wet, wash, dry brush, rubbing alcohol, salt, scraping and blotting are some of the old standbys that I teach often. This quarter we looked at some other ideas like plastic wrap, crystallizing (using Epsom salts) and rice absorbing. The results were fabulous!

Plastic wrap technique...

Dry brush and plastic wrap techniques...

Wet-in-wet and rubbing alcohol techniques...

Oil technique...

***Be watching for a handout on all of these techniques in the next month on theartofed.com

Once we had a good understanding of all the possibilities that watercolor can create, we started to paint strips of paper to represent textured parts of a landscape (the strips were torn before we started).  Most students painted between 7-8 strips of paper to use within their landscape and combined it with colored construction paper to complete the finished work. 

Architectural Printing and Castle Value Drawings

We have been spending a lot of time this quarter drawing, printing and sculpting architectural structures. We started with our reflection watercolor prints of famous architectural wonders from around the world and then moved onto pencil castle drawings showing value. Our last project of this unit was a tiny castle ceramic sculpture. Photos to be posted soon! 

Silhouettes of the Serengeti

Welcome 7th graders!

7th graders did a great job on our first project of Quarter 3. 

We started with the idea of a graded wash watercolor background. We added India Ink animal silhouettes with Sharpie trees and patterned boarders. The results are dramatic, stunning and very "warm" looking.  The perfect distraction from our frozen, arctic tundra we are living in now! 

Zentangle Animals

We switched out our Zentangle Landscapes for Zentangle Animals this quarter and the results were amazing! Most students were very successful with this project after we practiced Zentangle patterns as well as watercolor techniques. Great job 7th graders!

Wowza! Roadside Birds are finally coming to an end!

Lots of work went into this project...almost 9 class days! One of the longest projects we've done at BMS (Mrs. Hare's attention span isn't that long).

We began with drawing realistic birds found in MN road ditches (see other posts here and  here). Watercolor techniques such as wet-in-wet and salt were then added to create texture and detail to the bird's feathers. We also outlined with Sharpie to create more depth and detail within the birds. The next step was creating the bird's habitat from a collage background of construction paper and printed images of native MN grasses and flowers. We made the printed images from cut cork printing plates, brayers and block ink.

Five of these works will be submitting to the MN department of Natural Resource's "Roadsides are for the Birds" poster contest. Check out the link here for more information.

"Roadsides Are For The Birds" posters are coming along!

We are wrapping up gouging and started to print on our backgrounds today. We can't wait to get everything glued together!