more hearts

It's February, so I'm doing hearts with kids. All kinds of hearts. These patterned hearts with watercolor overlay were done with a first grade class, after a discussion about what makes a pattern a pattern. I love asking this question of little kids... it's always such an interesting discussion. Once we get to the idea that a pattern is something that repeats, then I am ready to move on into using patterns in some kind of art activity.

For this activity, I taught the students how to cut a "thumb heart" by folding a small piece of tagboard, making a fist, putting the folded side into the space between the thumb and the fist, and then cutting around the thumb. Sometimes it works. Well, most of the time it works, except when the student puts the folded side out by accident, or when he or she forgets to cut around the thumb and goes off the edge. But no matter, because I always bring hearts for tracing anyway.

Students are given their choice of using their own heart or one of mine. I show them how to trace three or four hearts onto a piece of 6x12 white construction paper, overlapping them, and then I model drawing different line patterns in the spaces with a black crayon. For this part, I choose kids with some kind of pattern on their clothes, and show how to transfer that pattern to paper. Then I show them how to use the watercolors (brush straight up, not smooshed into the paper, with a good amount of water to make a puddle in the paint). Then I send them off to work and help those who need a little assistance.

Cutting around the hearts and mounting them on black paper makes them look even better!



.

pop art hearts

These Pop Art heart paintings by first and second grade students, painted in mid-February in honor of Valentine's Day, were inspired by the art of Jim Dine and Wayne Thiebaud. I introduced the lesson by showing students copies of several works by these two artists. I asked them to describe what they saw and to make any comments they wanted about their observations. I pointed out how the repeated shapes in these works were painted with slightly different colors or patterns and explained that they were going to do a Pop Art painting of hearts. It seemed appropriate to do something with hearts since it was February, and this activity took the hearts out of the cliche realm.

>To lay out their designs, students were able to cut and trace their own hearts or to trace hearts that I provided. First grade students used larger hearts and were asked to trace four on the page; second grade students were asked to trace six. I initially wanted all the students to cut out their own hearts so they would be really different, but I discovered that this was more problematic than I expected with some of the students and turned out taking more time than I thought it would. Since my classes are only an hour, I was glad that I had thought to cut some of my own hearts "just in case." After a couple of classes, I offered the hearts for tracing as a first choice, and anyone who wanted to cut their own was invited to do so.

Because I wanted students to focus on subtle differences in color and patterns or brush treatments, and because this was the first painting they had done this year, I had them use just two primary colors and white to create as many different variations in color as possible. I modeled for them how to outline each heart first with a narrow brush, and then challenged them to paint each of their hearts a different way or with a different color or pattern. I teach at three schools, for a total of six first grade classes and eight second grade classes with approximately twenty students each, so after two weeks of heart painting, I was pretty much on heart overload, but I am pleased to report that collectively we ended up with approximately 1200 differently-painted hearts!