SES art classes devlop foundational skills exploring winter themes

Winter break may be over, but for the students in Sanfordville art teacher Shannon Sfroza's classes, the wintertime fun continues. Young artists from first grade to fourth have been diving into winter-themed projects, learning new techniques and developing foundational skills, all while exercising their creative might!

First graders in Ms. Sforza’s class have been exploring fundamental art elements such as line, color, shape, and texture to create snowman portraits using the "painted paper" approach. First they learned what qualities make a color warm or cool. They applied each pallette to create pieces of painted paper, then used scrapers and stamps to add dimension. Using a splatter paint technique to create snow, they added the final touches to their backgrounds. Next, the students used their new understanding of lines and shapes to draw their snowmen, and repeated those lines and shapes in smaller sizes to affect the look of patterns on their hats and scarves. The students also learned how to create a “bleed” effect using washable markers and water to add shading. The last step was to cut out and glue the snowmen onto their painted paper backgrounds.

Meanwhile, in her second grade class, Ms. Sfroza's students combined literacy and visual arts to create self portraits. The class drew inspiration Ezra Jack Keats’s book The Snowy Day. After reading about main character Peter’s snowy adventures -- including the moment when a snowball falls on his head from a tree -- students created self-portraits depicting themselves in the same predicament. This mixed media project combined collage and painting techniques, and students learned about symmetry by folding paper in half and cutting symmetrical hoods. They glued the hoods onto paper so that students could then draw in their faces. To do that, Ms. Sforza taught them ways to draw facial expressions that convey emotion and meaning, a key element of effective portraiture. Students mixed their own skin tones using watercolors, again blending warm and cool colors. They finished off their pieces by adding snowflakes using oil pastels and painted their backgrounds with watercolors, creating a "resist" effect, whereby the pastel repels the paint.
 

Third graders tackled a more advanced artistic concept called "foreshortening." This technique creates the illusion that objects are popping off the page by making items closest to the viewer appear largest while distant objects appear smallest. Students applied foreshortening to self-portraits showing themselves sledding down a hill, creating a dynamic, realistic perspective. They learned that they could convey motion in their art by adding angled lines drawn behind their sleds. Education researchers have shown that arts learning helps students develop spatial awareness and problem-solving skills, which is exactly what the Sanfordville students were practicing when they figured out how to express this idea of three-dimensional movement on a two-dimensional surface.
 

And finally... everyone loves a fun a pop-up book, but how many of us have actually delved into the intricacies of paper engineering to understand how it all works? Ms. Sfroza's fourth graders have! Exploring the world of pop-up art, the students created three-dimensional snowman portraits. They learned different paper cutting and folding methods, including a box fold mechanism for one snowman, as well as a "bridge layer" for attaching a second figure. In this lesson, the element of space was introduced, helping students understand how overlapping objects are used to give a piece of artwork depth and dimension. Students also experimented with chalk pastels for the first time, using them to draw and color their snowmen and backgrounds.