Category: 1st grade

The first grade been learning about the primary colors.  What are they?

We will look at artworks by Piet Mondrian (Peet Mawn-dree-on) who used primary colors to create abstract artworks.  An abstract artwork doesn’t show people, places, or things that look like real life.

Piet’s paintings look like cities. Below, look at Composition C. What colors are the streets? The buildings? Are there any cars? What about the streets, buildings, and cars in Broadway Boogie Woogie?

Can you see the streets and buildings in the students’ artworks? All the roads go up and down OR side to side. All the buildings are rectangles or squares.

This is a cartoon showing paintings by Piet Mondrian. Can you find Broadway Boogie Woogie? What year did he paint it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCmWnIoRpI

Here’s how one artist, Tung Pham, brought Broadway Boogie Woogie to life, like a real city.

 

 

 

 

There are two types of shapes: geometric and organic. Geometric shapes have names and most have straight sides. Organic shapes have no names and curvy sides. Organic shapes might remind you of other things, like leaves.

Artists, like Alexander Calder, use organic shapes to create artworks.  Alexander used organic shapes to create very large, moving sculptures called mobiles. He also used straight and curvy lines, too!

We will use organic shapes and curvy lines to create moving sculptures like Alexander Calder.

The first grade has been learning how to correctly use paintbrushes.  We will try out painting with different types of paint.

For this painting project, we will look at playgrounds. Playgrounds are full of lines and shapes. Can you find some of these lines and geometric shapes in these playgrounds?

We will include our favorite things on our playgrounds. Don’t forget your painting steps!

We are learning how to set up our painting materials, draw before we paint, and use our paintbrushes correctly. We will follow our four steps to use our paintbrushes “wash it, wipe it, blot it, next color.”  

Artists make art of people who are special to them, so we will use shapes and colors to create a portrait of someone who is special to us.

The first grade will learn the order of the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.  We will learn that indigo is a blue-violet hue.  An easy way to remember the order of the rainbow is Roy G. Biv.  

We will look at Peter Paul Rubens’s painting The Rainbow Landscape (painted in 1636) .  What do you see in this artwork?  

We will create our own rainbow landscape paintings and even learn to mix orange and indigo!