One can easily find a choice studio. In this choice-based art classroom, the students move comfortably within an organized structure of space, time and materials, managed by the teacher. They are well aware of their responsibilities and their possibilities. The teacher helps them to mine their lives and interests for the content of their…

Teaching the author's fifth-grade students a lesson on clothing design was a great way to show them how art and design are part of their everyday lives. It also allowed the students to express their personalities. Clotheslines served as an effective basis for their work. She and her class began by discussing how clothes can tell them about a…

Many painters use lines to express powerful emotions. Both Vincent van Gogh and Jean-Michel Basquiat had difficult lives filled with hardship, and died at a young age. They both used art to deal with their emotions. It seems like the stronger the feelings were in them, the faster the strokes were put down in their work. In this article,…

Mehndi, a traditional art form that dates back to before the twelfth century A.D., are temporary works of art created by painting with henna plant extract. Henna stain found on the fingers and toes of mummified pharaohs has led some people to believe that mehndi can be traced back to ancient Egypt. Indian weddings are not complete without a mehndi…

A humid summer haze covers the River Seine and the grassy bank where young men and boys go swimming on Sunday. Everything seems so quiet, still, and very hot. They wear hats to protect them from the hot sun. The artist Georges Seurat used warm tones to give viewers the feeling of the hot sun. Seurat was trying to catch the dazzle of hot sunlight…

Artists often paint the different seasonal activities people engage in and the way the world looks as changes take place. The weather for each of the four seasons is different. Farmers plant crops and gardens in the spring and harvest their crops in the fall, just like "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. To begin, children will observe…

Romero Britto is a wonderful artist for young students to study when learning the building blocks of art and design. Colorful, linear, and full of bold patterns, Britto's work blends a contemporary cubist style and pop art commercial appeal. Themes of this contemporary artist's work include animals, flowers, still life, and people in joyful…

The author personally started making narrative collaged necklaces about 10 years ago, after being inspired by an artist friend. She would take mini images from magazines and collage them together onto laminate tile samples from a hardware store. She then adds colorful brads and stickers, and then paint and oil pastel over them, finally sealing…

The drab, cold days of winter were not helping to motivate the author's painting students. Still-life work appeared forced, tight, and overworked. A downed white birch in her front yard provided the author a resource and inspiration. In this article, students do some timed gestural drawings of still life using sticks as paintbrushes. (Contains 1…

In this article, the author describes how her second-graders created their cool polar bears. The students used the elements of shape and texture to create the bears. They used Monet's technique of dabbing paint so as to give the bear some texture on his fur.

This article describes a miniature painting project that allows students to research a master painter and then replicate the work on a smaller scale. This lesson focuses on the students' ability to learn to identify style, subject matter, themes, and content in painting through the study of historical paintings, and the application of various…

The aim of this study is to implement a new method of teaching painting which uses the Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) approach for the undergraduate art students at Tehran University. In the current study, the quasi-experimental method was used to test the hypothesis three times (pre, mid and post-tests). Thirty students from two classes…

Fauvism is a style of painting based on the use of intensely vivid colors that were not natural to the faces, landscapes and objects being painted. It was how artists expressed themselves during the first decade of the 20th century, and lasted only a short time. The artists were called "les Fauves," which means "the wild beasts." In this article,…

In this article, the author describes how her studio art students created their Pop art-style self-portraits. Students were each given a printout of a black-and-white picture of themselves that the author had taken with her digital camera. With this picture, students took tracing paper and traced a basic outline of their face, hair, and neck. They…

Creating a painting with texture is easy, although using heavy gel medium or modeling paste may be pricey ways to go about it. High school artists generally like making collages and mixed-media. In this article, the author suggests ways to capitalize on that interest with inexpensive fabric in a painting project.