David Hockney: Abstract Landscapes

It's been a while, so let's just jump right in!  Second Graders have been working hard learning all about how to create depth in a landscape.  We started by looking at some David Hockney landscapes and learned to identify the horizon line, foreground, middle ground and background.  We then
learned that artists can make things look near and far by using overlapping, changing the size of objects and changing the placement of objects.  We always practice these new skills in our sketchbooks first.  Finally we created our own David Hockney inspired abstract landscapes.  And here is how they came out!

David Hockney Landscape

Pop-up Landscapes

Since January, this first grade class has been learning all about city scapes and landscapes. The concept was introduced when we read "Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold and students created their own city scapes featuring meaningful places in Brooklyn using oil pastel watercolor resist. We then moved onto landscapes where students were encouraged to create a 2D imaginary landscape using construction paper collage.

With this project we "pulled" our landscapes up off the page to assemble imaginary sculptural landscapes. We explored the different shapes we could make when we folded, bent, ripped, twisted and crumpled strips of construction paper. I demonstrated how to attach these shapes to their paper plates by folding a tab at the end of each strip of paper (a flat surface for their dot of glue). Materials: construction paper cut into strips, leftover paper scraps in various shapes from collage, glue sticks, paper plates.