This activity features artwork by "Grandma Moses" in which children will learn the picture plane in terms of foreground, middle ground, and background. The teacher also introduces the children to Eric Carle's colorful collaged images in his books. Using the two artists' methods, children experimented and invented new techniques and colors. As the…

Long before children enter school, it is their imagination that informs their play. Their drawing, too, relies heavily on their natural, unfettered ability to portray both the world around them and their own experiences within that world, without the conventional boundaries between "real" and "imaginary." Surrealism then, is an art movement and…

This article describes how the author exposes her students to the world of Jackson Pollock, the artist who brings to mind dripping, meandering, splashing puddles of paint. Pollock's action paintings of the late 1940s-'50s call out for unfettered movement, fluidity, and freedom of application. Is it even possible to capture the action, rhythm and…

Abstraction is, in effect, a simplification and reduction of shapes with an absence of detail designed to comprise the essence of the more naturalistic images being depicted. Without even intending to, young children consistently create interesting, and sometimes beautiful, abstract compositions. A child's creations, moreover, will always seem to…

"Shells and Patterns" was a project the author felt would easily put smiles on the faces of her fifth-graders, and teach them about unity and the use of watercolor pencils as well. It was thrilling to see the excitement in her students as they made their line drawings of shells come to life. For the most part, they quickly got the hang of…

This article presents an art project designed for upper-elementary students to (1) imagine visual differences in the sun's appearance during the four seasons; (2) develop ideas for visually translating their personal experiences regarding the seasons to their sun drawings; (3) create four distinctive seasonal suns using colors and imagery to…

The author of this article describes how her eighth grade art students heighten their awareness of differences between their public self and their inner self by: manipulating water bottles to create sculptural self-portraits; constructing armatures of the generic person in "The Scream" by Edward Munch; finding and collecting examples of images and…

Because it is important for middle-school students to feel confident about themselves and their abilities, the author wanted to challenge her seventh graders with a drawing problem that would yield a high rate of success. So she asked them to put their best foot forward as she introduced a lesson on contour drawing. The assignment was to draw a…