Class Projects
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
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Look here for some of the exciting projects students are creating in art class!
Happy Birthday Mr. Picasso!
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, all K-8th grade students are exploring Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s vibrant use of color, bold experimentation with shape and form and perpetual transformation as an artist. We are experimenting in color theory, practicing the elements and principles of art and design and refining the ability to create forms from two dimensional space throughout our exploration. Additionally, our study of Mr. Picasso’s life as an artist shares with students some influential 20th Century art movements including Realism, Classicism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism as we create our own priceless works of art that enrich students’ homeroom curricular themes.
Kindergarten
SELF PORTRAIT IN ROSE
Rooms 105, 204 & 208
Mixed-media
Social Studies Integration: All About Me
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Kindergartners are busy creating Rose Period self portraits as enrichment to their homeroom All About Me unit. Students are working with shapes (triangles, diamonds, squares and rectangles) as they create their harlequin patterned outfits, learning about warm colors (red, orange and yellow) as they create Rose Period watercolor landscapes and practicing observational drawing as they create their own faces (complete with eyes, ears, hair, a nose and a mouth) with careful color choices. They are uniting all of these art concepts and methods into a mixed media composition that would truly make Mr. Picasso happy!
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Rose Period
Elements & Principles of Art: Color, Pattern and Shape
1st grade
PUZZLING SELF PORTRAIT
Rooms 209, 210 & 211
Mixed-media
Social Studies Integration: All About Me
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
1st graders are also exploring their All About Me homeroom unit with self portraits—Surrealist style! Students are creating Surrealist self portraits on 8.5 x 11 cardboard puzzles. They are looking at Mr. Picasso’s use of shape (Organic Shapes=Surrealism & Geometric Shapes=Cubism) and his experimentation with rainbow colors…We are making our faces from two angles—a profile and frontal view. This idea of two different views and/or multiple images of the same subject occupying the same space was one of Cubism’s most avante garde breaks from classical painting. Our puzzling mixed media self portraits will function as interactive play puzzles for students to share with family and friends at the end of this study.
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Analytic Cubism & Surrealism
Elements & Principles of Art: Line, Pattern, and Color
2nd grade
CUBIST BIOMES
Rooms 203 & 207
Mixed-media
Science Integration: Biomes
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
2nd graders are also exploring Cubism in the art room this quarter. They are looking at their science curriculum through a particularly Picasso Cubist lens as they create warm and cool color biomes—warm deserts, cool rain forests, warm savannas and cool tundras. In this project they are focusing on Analytic Cubism—fracturing shapes and creating almost monochromatic landscapes in a style invented and popularized by Picasso and Georges Braque. They have researched their biomes and have created biome field guides in chalk pastel to act as references for their crayon resist painting. The animals and plants of their biomes are being created using only squares, rectangles, diamonds and triangles. By creating warm and cool color landscapes they are practicing the power of shape to create composition while looking at color as an emotive force.
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Analytic Cubism
Elements & Principles of Art: Pattern, Shape & Color
3rd grade
REDESIGNING THE CHICAGO RIVER
Rooms 201, 202 & 205
Mixed-media
Science Integration: Mighty Acorns Curriculum
“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into sun.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
3rd graders are looking at Picasso’s Later Years Period as they study the Chicago River and his painting series Doves, 1957. Picasso painted a group of paintings while living in Antibes, France that was both whimsical and a harkening back to his more realistic painting style. He painted the Mediterranean Sea through his window over and over again with vibrant blues and sunny yellows bursting through his window. He also painted his pet doves near his window sill in different poses—sometimes perched on the window and sometimes in pigeon holes. (Mr. Picasso loved animals—he had a pet owl, many dogs and cats and a goat named Esmeralda (which he let roam free in his house at Antibes).) We combined these ideas with our recent mosaic bench project that pays homage to the Chicago River in its many seasons. We’ve talked about how mosaics were like tile collages (and Cubism:)) while we created warm and cool color papers with tempera paint and texture rollers. We sketched the mosaic benches outside in the sun and from photographs in the studio on rainy days. We practiced perspective drawing as we created distance in our handmade paper collages and now we are adding the seasonal birds of the Chicago River—robins in spring, goldfinches in summer, crows in fall and cardinals in winter to perch on our own window sills. This project is an enriching extension of 3rd graders’ Mighty Acorns field work and a great way to experience our new mosaic bench outdoor classroom.
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Later Works Period
Elements & Principles of Art: Color, Shape, Texture, Space and Unity
4th grade
ODE TO JOY
Rooms 307 & 308
Mixed-media
Science Integration: Chicago Sinfonietta Partnership
“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
4th graders are looking at Mr. Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism as they create their favorite instrument from each of the four families of the orchestra as reinforcement of their Chicago Sinfonietta partnership. We are using Three Musicians as the inspiration for this project and students are learning that Pablo Picasso was the first artist to elevate collage to high art and it has stayed that way ever since! Students are practicing collage using wallpaper, fabric samples, decorative papers and sheet music as they create their favorite café scene. Just as Pablo Picasso chose to dress his musicians in commonly recognized personas—the harlequin, the perrot and a friar, students are choosing their favorite characters—football players, Lady Gaga and Mr. Picasso himself to act as their musicians. Students are adding charcoal pencil to their collage to create details and enhance this multimedia exploration.
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism
Elements & Principles of Art: Line, Unity, Rhythm and Pattern
5th grade
PLASTIC METAPHORS
Rooms 310 & 311
Sculpture
Science Integration: Scientific Method Language Arts Integration: Poetry
“You don’t make art, you find it.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Pablo Picasso once said that his sculptures were plastic metaphors…5th graders are creating found object self portrait sculptures/metaphors based on Mr. Picasso’s love of African masks (especially those from Liberia) and his Later Works Period—whimsical sculptures that he made from a variety of objects from around the house. Students are focusing on Chicago’s Picasso (The big flamingo (?) downtown.) and his object sculptures such as a baboon he envisioned while watching his son Claude play with his toy car (Poor Claude—Pablo used his car as the head for the baboon sculpture!). Each student has chosen an animal to represent themselves just as Mr. Picasso often used a bull to symbolize himself. Students brought in a variety of recycled objects in from home to construct their animal sculptures and are adding papier mache to create an overall finished product. We are creating cinquain poems as artist statements and practicing Scientific Method as they work to solve their challenge of how to make their sculptures balance!
Visual Culture: Picasso’s African Period & Later Works Period
Elements & Principles of Art: Color, Form, Unity and Proportion
6th grade
ODE TO GUITAR
Room 301
Assemblage
Science Integration: Scientific Method Language Arts Integration: Poetry
“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
As 6th graders learn to play the acoustic guitar in music class they are exploring Mr. Picasso’s cardboard guitar assemblages that took the art world by storm…Cardboard as fine art? Only Pablo Picasso could make it so… Mr. Picasso loved the guitar—and flamenco music from his native Spain. He never played the guitar but created paintings, collages and assemblages of this instrument over and over again throughout his lifetime. One of his most unique renderings (and my favorite:)) —the cardboard guitar— was a new way to create a sculpture that hadn’t been explored before. As an homage to learning to play guitar in music class, students are creating their own cardboard guitar out of reused cardboard that they have brought in from home. We are documenting this project using our IS IT ART OR IS IT SCIENCE? Scientific Method journal. We are also creating poetic odes to honor our guitars based on Pablo Neruda’s Odes To Everyday Things—-what fun!
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Analytic Cubism
Elements & Principles of Art: Color, Texture, Form, Unity and Balance
7th grade
IMAGINE PEACE
Rooms 302 & 304
3D Construction
Science Integration: Scientific Method Social Studies Integration War & Peace
“What do you think an artist is? …He is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
7th graders are exploring Pablo Picasso’s War and Peace era. We are looking at what is considered the most influential artwork of the 20th century—Guernica and at his peace doves that were first created for the World Peace Conference in Paris (1949). Guernica was a protest against the growing fascist movement in Spain prior to WWII and Picasso’s dove prints were the first time this bird was used as a symbol for peace. We talked about how Picasso (and other artists) can use their art as a way to respond to current events and create change through peaceful response. We practiced line in three forms in this project—drawing in pencil, drawing with glue and drawing with wire. We created our line doves using collograph printmaking and colorful wire and are now busy painting primary colored wooden bases for our multi-media sculptures and will soon put all of our symbols for peace together. At the end of our project we will write peace in over 100 languages on our sculptures!
Visual Culture: Picasso’s After War Period
Elements & Principles of Art: Proportion, Color, Emphasis, Line
8th grade
SURREALIST SELF PORTRAITS
Rooms 303 & 309
Sculpture
Science Integration: Scientific Method Language Arts Integration Poetry
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
—Pablo Ruiz Picasso
8th graders are creating surrealist self portrait sculptures out of panty hose, wire and recycled carboard! We are practicing the art of self portrait in both narrative writing and acrylic paint. Our poems talk about our inner feelings and our sculptures are 3D representations from two perspectives (frontal view and silhouette) to demonstrate how we are more complex than a simple photograph. We are exploring the idea of identity using Scientific Method and looking at how Pablo Picasso painted numerous self portraits over his lifetime and how each became more and more surreal as he got older—demonstrating his transformation as an artist and his desire to always challenge our concept of reality.
Visual Culture: Picasso’s Surrealism
Elements & Principles of Art: Color, Form, Pattern, Composition
Check out more of the current projects happening in the art room on our Announcements page!
