2nd Grade Color Wheels

For our second project of the school year second grade is learning about the primary and secondary colors using paint!!!
We had a very exciting class experimenting with mixing our primary (red, yellow, blue) colors to create the 3 secondary colors (orange, green, and purple).  Cleaning our brushes and placing our artwork on a drying rack were also new concepts covered this class.

Scrub! Scrap, Scrap! To clean our brushes.

Who knew box lids made such great paint trays?

Wipping off the extra water in the brush bristols.

PURPLE IS OUR FAVORITE SECONDARY COLOR!

2nd Grade Landscapes

Jug Bay Natural Area in PG County

2nd Grade's Landscapes

We are continuing with our study of the artist Vincent Van Gogh and his many wonderful works of art.  For this project we were looking at examples of some of his many landscapes.  

We learned that landscapes are paintings or drawings of things found in nature; for example trees, hills, fields, and lakes. We also learned that there are 3 sections in a landscape. There is a foreground, a mid-ground, and a background.

The grass in the foreground is larger than anything else in the landscape because it is closer to us.  The wagon and person in the mid-ground are medium sized objects; they are not as close to us as the items in the foreground so they need to be smaller, to show that they are further away.  The items in the background such as the mountains and houses are drawn very small because they are very far away from us, and the way to show that they are far away is to draw the mountains and trees smaller than the people in the mid-ground and the grass in the foreground.  

For our landscape the students looked at 2 pictures from a local natural reserve in Prince George's County called Jug Bay.

They were able to pick which picture they wanted to base their landscape off of.  We first drew out the items in our landscape in pencil. Then using markers we added patterns to the different areas in our landscape (example short lines of dark and light green in the grass areas).

Once all areas were filled with patterns, the students used a small amount of water to blend their markers together to get a painted effect on their landscapes similar to Vincent Van Gogh.
Take a look at the wonderful examples of students' artwork below.

Once completed with their landscapes the students filled out a worksheet that asked them to identify what elements of their landscape were in the foreground, mid-ground, and background of their landscapes.

Van Gogh's Sunflowers

2nd Grade's 

Van Gogh's Sunflowers

In second grade we have been studying the artwork of Vincent Van Gogh.  More specifically for this project we have been looking at his paintings of sunflowers.  We began with a class discussion on the different colors and shapes we saw in his paintings. The list our classes came up with is below.  

Yellow             Circles

Red                  Rectangles 

Orange            Squares

Green              Ovals

Brown             Triangles

                        Crescent or Moon Shapes

Once we determined what shapes were needed to create our flowers, the students began to participate in a directed drawing.  

We started out by using our hand to get us the size and shape needed for the centers of our sunflowers.  The students were to have two sunflowers on our drawings (1 full flower and half a sunflower).  They were then to use triangles, crescents, ovals, and circles to create the petals for their sunflowers.  Then they used a long skinny rectangles to create the stems for their sunflowers.

The students were able to get such vibrate colors and great texture!!!