zen pumpkins

This easy art activity is perfect for anytime in October. Students work with lines and patterns, and teachers get some great art for display! 

All you need is orange and black construction paper, some sharpies (or black crayons), scissors and glue, and about an hour at most.

To draw the pumpkin shape, have students draw ... with pencil.... a "flattened" circle and add a stem a little way down in the center. Then show them how to draw the vertical lines, just a little curved, with some going "backward" from the base of the stem. These gently curved lines are what gives the pumpkin drawing its three dimensional look! In fact, it's a very simple technique for giving a flat shape a three-dimensional look!

Trace carefully over the pencil lines with a black sharpie, then fill each space with a different pattern, using lines and/or simple shapes.

It doesn't hurt to talk about patterns before drawing... and even doing some simple examples. The key here is that every space needs to have a different pattern!

When the patterns are finished, color the stem green if desired, cut out, mount on black paper, and it's done! It's easy, it's fun, and, like all Zentangle work, it's totally relaxing.

Perfect when you need to just take a break!

For more comprehensive Halloween art lessons, visit my TeachersPayTeachers store! Just click on the TeachersPayTeachers logo up there on the sidebar!

And enjoy!

harvest moon and spooky trees

Sometimes I get inspiration for art lessons from random pictures, and that's how this one happened. One day my Facebook feed presented a photo of a tree silhouetted against a huge moon and this art lesson immediately formed itself in my mind:  tissue paper collage moon + spooky tree. I could see the end result in my brain, and backtracked through that image to develop the lesson for a second grade classroom.

At first, I thought it would be a fine idea to have the students create the circle using a compass, but no compasses were to be found so I opted for a hand-drawn circle, which turned out to be a huge benefit!  The circle was filled with tissue paper collage, and while that dried, we made the trees -- basically a line drawing outlined with another continuous line, cut on the outside line, and flipped over.

My suggestions to the kids:
Don't put the moon in the exact center of the page.
Don't put the tree in the exact center of the moon.

Some of the kids had a little trouble cutting out the tree shape, especially if they had crossed branches, so I helped by showing them how to cut into a closed shape. For a "first time" try, I think these turned out great! I wrote up the lesson and had a few other teachers try it out, and it was a hit with everyone!

It's a great art lesson for teaching how to use space, talking about the use of warm and cool colors, and working with interesting lines. It was fun, easy, a little messy, and generally pretty successful. And it's perfect for October! Just spooky enough to be "Halloween-y" without all the Halloween hype. This lesson, with step-by-step directions, is available in my TeachersPayTeachers store. Look for Harvest Moon Tree Silhouette!

sunbursts, starbursts, and silhouettes

Sometimes when I am looking for an idea for an art lesson, I scout around the Artsonia website. That's where I found these interesting starburst designs, done with primary and secondary colors. They looked easy and fun so I decided to try them in warm or cool colors with a second grade class. To introduce the lesson, I just posted a piece of paper and started drawing with three warm colors:  yellow, gold, and orange. I tried to emphasize the zigzaggy method of creating concentric circles of rays. After I had laid down about six rows, I put up another paper and started another one with cool colors: turquoise, blue, and purple. During this introduction, I did not speak at all. When I had two good starts, a warm one and a cool one, I had the students tell me what I did. These became the directions:

- choose 3 colors, warm or cool
- start near the center with a dot
- get bigger and bigger
- fill the whole paper
- no scribbling!

I gave them directions to choose three warm or cool colors and show them to me. Several students mixed the palettes; instead of giving them paper, I said, "you have two warms and one cool" or "you have two cools and one warm." I didn't tell them which color needed to be replaced; I left that up to them. As they got started, I quickly noticed that some students had difficulty making the short, zigzaggy strokes radiating out from the center of the circle. A few were coloring concentric lines instead, or lines that looked like open zigzags. For those few students, I took their hand in mine and showed them how to make the little zigzags.

When the first student had finished filling the whole paper, I interrupted their work for a lesson in making the cityscape silhouette. On black construction paper, I first drew a line across the bottom, a few inches up. Then I started with a tall rectangle in the center for a building, added a roof, and proceeded to add more rectangles until building shapes extended across the whole paper. I pointed out to the students how the buildings were not touching, but were pretty close to each other. I demonstrated cutting them carefully, and gluing down the silhouette. I made a big deal about putting the glue on the side of the paper that has the pencil lines so that the clean side will be the one we see when it's done. When I held up the finished product, there were a lot of oooohs and aaaaahs.

When doing the silhouette, some students mistakenly cut off the baseline, or cut off one of the buildings by accident, so they needed to do that part over. A few students put the glue on the wrong side of the paper (this always happens!) so we needed to do a little erasing. Overall, the results were pretty striking, especially when they were lined up along the white board tray.

And what about the other half of the black paper? Students were very intrigued by the opposite effect, and asked what to do with them. I decided to collect them and use them for a future activity. I haven't invented that one yet, but they are safe in a manila envelope.

patterned circles

This first grade observation lesson is almost identical to the Kindergarten "playing with patterns" activity, but in this version, the crayon-drawn patterns are confined inside connected, free-drawn circles. Students use the same rolled-paper viewfinders to observe the details and patterns in a variety of photographs.

Students are first asked to think about what it means to be an artist, and also to name some things that artists do. This is followed by a short discussion about the importance of observing carefully, the making of paper tube viewfinders, and some initial observations of two or three photographs. Students are asked to focus on the details and patterns rather than the contours or subject matter. After these initial observations, students draw one circle about the size of their fist, placing it somewhere away from the center of the paper but not touching an edge. I model this on an actual sheet of paper to show them an approximate size. Circles that are too small will not show the patterns well, and circles that are too big might cause the student to run out of space, so I do like to suggest a size.

The first photograph is held up and students are asked to look carefully at the colors, shapes, spots, lines, and directions, then to fill the first circle with the pattern they see. When most are finished, directions are given to draw another circle, about the same size, touching the first circle. The next pattern is observed, discussed, and drawn in that circle. Subsequent circles are drawn one at a time, making sure each one touches only one previous circle. Students are reminded to completely fill each new circle with patterns they observe in the photographs, and to pay close attention to lines, dots, colors, shapes, and directions.

I especially like that this lesson requires students to really observe what they see, and places more emphasis on the observation than the content. By directing the lesson one circle at a time, I am able to get the students to slow down and pay closer attention to what they are putting on their paper. When they draw a new circle, I remind them that they can attach the new circle anywhere, but they should look to see where the bigger spaces are, and go in that direction. We keep adding new circles until we run out of time, leaving about ten minutes for discussion.

During the sharing/discussion time, I hold photographs next to students' versions of the patterns. I also have students compare and talk about different treatments of the same pattern. Students are able to see that there is more than one way to draw something, that people see things differently, and that close observation is important for an artist. As simple as this lesson is, the results can be very striking and quite varied. While the samples shown here were done with crayon on white construction paper, but I can see them being done on dark construction paper using construction paper crayons or pastels, or even painted or done with markers or colored pencils.
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