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

Cubist Roosters

This was a wonderful 3rd Grade project included in a unit on Cubism and Picasso.  We looked at many of Picasso's paintings and drawings of roosters and watched a short film of Picasso himself painting a rooster.    This started a discussion about how Cubists like Picasso were inspired by African art and it's powerful use of geometric shapes and sharp lines.  They also learned that Cubists were interested in rendering multiple perspectives of an entire subject on a two dimensional plane.  We explored this by thinking about peeling an orange and what the surface of a sphere would look like flattened out on a page.  From here, we looked at photos of roosters and broke them down into simple geometric shapes and thought of ways to draw the all sides of the rooster even though we had a two dimensional piece of drawing paper.  Materials: sharpie, watercolor, oranges, drawing paper, images of roosters, Picasso Rooster prints.