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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Hangin' with Vincent (Van Gogh)! 5th grade explores his Impressionist masterpieces & touches on art careers





5th grade is currently studying Vincent Van Gogh! First we watched "Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists" Vincent Van Gogh to really understand where the artist began from young to old. It also explores some of his famous masterpieces such as his "Sunflowers" and studies of his bedroom ("Bed Room at Arles", 1889).
We first started looking at Van Gogh's style in his "Sunflowers". We looked at how Van Gogh has a distinct style of layered, thickly applied, long dashed brushstrokes. 5th grade then took a stab at it by first drawing a vase design of their choice, a horizon line, such as the table it's sitting on (since it's not magically leviating), and concentrated on mimicking & understanding the drying petals of the bouquet and then using oil pastel (contains wax) to mimic the dashed brushstrokes. Then we turned it into a watercolor/ oil pastel resist. The class also really started to grasp the correct way to use watercolor with wet on wet and mixing techniques with their brush!  Here are some more examples from class.




Then after completing that, we started to look at Van Gogh's 3 studies (only 1 is found in the United States, and that is "Bedroom at Arles" and found at the Chicago Art Institute) of his bedrooms. We looked and pointed out the different between the 3. Then I asked if the students had heard of the art based career "interior designer". I then explained that interior designers help pick out how a room is designed from anything from the colors of the walls, to the kind of chairs in the room, to how to cordinate furniture and combinations of bedding and pillows. We also learned what warm & cool colors were, how they can psychologically make us think that we feel warmer or cooler than we are, and also change out mood. Interior designers take this into account when planning for a client. 5th grade's project was to redesign Van Gogh's bedroom with color, pattern, and later make things 3-D. We made things 3-D by taking another photo copy of the same bedroom, and colored in items, cut then out, then glued them down with a piece of foamcore, to make it raised on the page(in mine it's' the chair, the bedpost, and a picture frame). We then added other 3-D elements like felt for curtains, a bedspread, or even a carpet.
student work

student work

 

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