Blogger #Crush

This #Crush from my crush series belongs to Ginger Pacer of Paint Brush Rocket! When choosing another blogger to write about I was beyond struggling to choose just one.  I follow and admire so may amazing brains and creative doers in the blogging world. Here is how I came up with my Blogging #Crush.  Who is currently inspiring the lessons in my classroom?  Who has been an inspiration in the past?  Who continues to share ideas, tips and tricks... so Ginger wins this February! I was able to meet this amazing art educator last year and really felt a friendship connection.  I saw a post a couple months ago on radial balance and knew I had to give it a try. Check out Gingers post , because she really gives a lot of tips and tricks that I'm not going to cover in this post. 

I saw her amazing paintings and knew that I what I wanted to do but first I wanted to teach a digital version of this using the app Brushes. The students were VERY intent to learn this lesson shown below.  This is one of my favorite apps to teach because it teaches the system of layers.  I like teaching apps that teach a system... this concept can be transferred to many other art programs such as photoshop.  Get this concept in the minds of our littles and they will be able to jump right ahead when they learn like programs in the future. This is a VERY quick tutoral focused on giving you, the readers of this post a quick over view.  This is not editited... simply a flip vid.

Students created some amazing works in the hour that I had them! I had several students download this free app and send me emails of their artwork. They really learned how to create more advanced artworks when exploring at home.

The second part of this lesson was painting. As I mentioned, Ginger's explanation is much better than I will be providing on the 'how' of teaching the painting portion. Some of the things that I did differently was provide a tracer and the students kept the artwork on a large sheet of tag while painting and cut it out later. Also, I only painted one day and on day two students added details with oil pastel. 

When painting, some of the kids got done a little early I allowed them to play with blocks... but they had to create sculptures that were using the concepts of radial balance.

As mentioned, day three was adding the final details with oil pastel, cutting out the circle, and answering this small evaluation to place on the back of the artwork. 

I only made a graph for one of the classes but I found it interesting to read that most of the students loved and would choose creating in paint over digital if they had to choose. I still find that it's valuable to use the digital medium to expose students to different forms of art as well as meeting ALL student interests and skills.