Chihuly installation with coffee filters

You will need:
500 coffee filter pack
Crayola markers
Couple dozen solo cups
Scissors
Water in a spay bottle
Masking tape to stick to a window

So simple and so effective. Students folded a coffee filter down to a 1/4 slice (fold it in half, crease, fold it in half one more time) and colored with markers a design on one side of the folded filter. Students cut the edge in a organic way. Spray filter generously with water so that the ink from the top layer soaks down to the rest of the filter. Unfold, and drape over a cup. When dry, tape them up on a wall for your own Chihuly installation

Matisse inspired batiks 6th grade

You will need:

Sheet of construction paper ( some brands work better than other so you might want to experiment)
Print outs of a variety of vases, flowers, and fruit
Oil pastels
A piece of chalk pastel
Watery black tempera paint (the consistency of chocolate milk)

After learning all about Matisse and his love for interior still lives, my 6 th grade class embarked on creating their own Matisse inspired still lives. Students first created some thumbnails of their composition. I gave them print outs to look at of different vases, flowers, and fruit so that everyone's was a little different. Once they had their sketch down, they drew a simple contour drawing of their composition with a piece of chalk on their construction paper. For the batik process, it is important that you do not color over the top of the chalk. Students then colored AROUND the chalk with oil pastel and filled their composition with patters and color. The last process is the best. Students took their works to a painting station and covered the drawing with a coat of watery black tempera paint. They were so scared! Once covered, you rinse the paint off in the sink, the. Black paint does not stick to the oil pastel and only sticks to the chalk pastel. This gives you a great outline effect like Matisse used with out it getting too "outline-y"

Upside down drawing the masters

I think there is something really powerful about copying a master work, especially in middle school. For this project, we took Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain drawing upside down technique to the next level. I was inspired by an article (which I wish I could find to give proper credit) in which a HS teacher had her students draw Picasso's Stravinsky upside down and apply a color scheme.

What you need:

A large sheet of paper (I used 18 x 24)
A print out of any master work cartoonified (simply, a work of art that has been simplified to a line drawing like something you would find in a coloring book. Just google "Picasso coloring book" or "American gothic coloring book" ect...)
Pencil
Crayons, color pencil, and markers
Black sharpies or other black markers

Have the students first practice drawing Picssso's Stravinsky on a piece of copy paper to get started. Practicing will take you about a day and this project last about 4 weeks ( 50 minute sessions every other day) if you don't have that much time, use a smaller piece of paper. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is now on YouTube. I highly suggest showing students the segment on drawing upside down. She explains it in a way that I couldn't.

The students drew their master work from observation completely upside down the entire time. This is a break through technique for those of you that have not tried this with students. When it was time to color them in, I taught them about every color scheme I could think of and made them choose one. Everyone was happy with their end product.

Stella inspired sculptural reliefs

All you need for this project is:

Poster board (1 sheet per student)
9 x 12ish piece of cardboard off a box or something
French curves (I printed some out and cut them out with an exacto and had kids trace that rather that buying some)
Cheap acrylic paint
Glue gun and glue
Scraps of card board or foam core


This project was super simple and the kids (8th grade) absolutely loved it. I introduced the lesson by showing them the works of frank Stella and how his art evolved over the years. I couldn't find a youtube video that wasn't really boring so I just showed them a slide show of his work. We started by tracing the French curves onto poster board. I told them to trace 6 large, 5 medium, and 4 smalls. The smaller ones Are really hard to cut out so kids that had a hard time with it did less smalls and more larges. Once the French curves were cut, the kiddos painted them a solid color, let them dry, then splatter painted each curve. Oh how they love to splatter paint. Once all curves were painted, they painted the cardboard backing. I told them to paint stripes or some other geometric pattern on the cardboard. Anything will work because you don't see much of the background. Next, they arranged the French curves on the backing and cut up little pieces of foam core to attach with hot glue to the back of each curve in a variety of heights to give the work some dimension. Some kids got crazy with it. The crazier the better.

Sorry for the bad picture quality! iPads don't take very good pictures!