2nd graders recently learned about the Op artist, Bridget Riley. Ms. Riley is an artist from London who specializes in creating optical illusions in her artwork. Her artwork is usually large-scale because it has a more disorientating effect on the viewer when it is larger. The kids thought her artwork was super cool! They were blown away by the fact that even though the painting wasn't moving, it gave the effect that it was.
This Bridget Riley project was different than what I have done in the past. This is a project that I got from my friend, Tasha Newton, over at iartmyjob.wixsite.com !This year, I had students create a weaving inspired by her work.
On day one, I introduced students to her work. Then, they received a white sheet of paper that had been folded in half. They cut 5 crazy lines into it (curly, angled, etc). Then they began to weaving into these oddly cut shapes.
The second day, they finished their weaving. Then they chose a black sheet of paper, folded it in half, and cut a geometric shape from it. They glued the black paper with the shape cut out of it on top of their weaving.
One class was a day behind the others so they just created the weaving and didn't glue the black paper on top.
This was another project inspired by Don Masse over at shinebritezamorano.com
A while back I wrote up part uno to our Invader unit that we had been working on. It was a loooong project for the kids but Invader seems to be their favorite artist they have learned about this year. They had spent lots of time practicing drawing space invaders and then creating one as a paper mosaic.
After creating their paper mosaic, they FINALLY got to move onto the final stage of the project. I created large square tiles for each student. I definitely need to either teach the kids how to roll slabs next time or buy a slab roller. Throwing 100-ish slab tiles took FOREVERRRRRR! Students used square legos to gently press into the clay. This left small square indents that represented each pixel of their space invader. We talked about how pressing the lego into clay created a different feeling on the clay. This is called texture.
Next time I do this project, I need to find a better way to fire these. This time, I gently stacked 3-4 tiles on top of each other. Because some of them warped as they were drying, when the tiles were stacked up, the weight cracked about ten of them. It wasn't a huge deal. I patched them up with some hot glue and the kids took it in stride.
After being fired, we used crayons to color our space invader. Then we used tempera cakes to paint over the space invader and the background. We talked about how we wanted our space invader to really pop out from the background. We learned that we could use to dissimilar colors to create contrast.
Harmony and Consolidated Elementary Art Teacher in Milton, WI. UW-Eau Claire graduate. WAEA President-Elect. Apple Teacher.