Second+Grade

=**The Art of Second Grade**=

In Second Grade we strive to provide an environment in which students feel encouraged and supported to explore new materials/media and deepen their understanding of familiar ones. We place an emphasis upon using personal experience as subject matter, allowing the student to also explore their feelings, impressions, thoughts and theories about their worlds, as well as, refining the student's ability to "see" and translate what they see into a two or three dimensional form. In this way we hope that students become evermore comfortable and familiar with the visual arts as another language with which they can communicate and express themselves for the rest of their lives.

Blind Contour Drawings
Our first project is an investigation of "contour" or the exterior edges of an object, in this case our hands. The students were asked to create contour drawings of their hands but with a twist! They were asked not to look at their papers while drawing, thus the "blind" part. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the student's ability to accurately "see" what they are observing and to be less concerned with what their drawing looks like. This sets the stage for the next phase of this project... Blind Contour Portraits!!!!

Blind Contour Portraits
Here the students have begun the Blind Contour portraits of their neighbors. Its challenging not to peek!!!

Lastly, the students use the skills they have learned with blind contour drawing to create self portraits.



**Water Color Self Portraits**
After the more "loose" work with the blind contour drawings, the students embarked on more formal and realistic self portraits using water color pencils. We began by studying the basic proportions of the human face, learning how the features of our faces relate to one another. We practiced our facial proportions with a practice drawing of a "dummy" face before we began our final, actual self portraits. First we drew a rough sketch of our faces in order to get the placement and proportion of our features correct. Next we began testing colors to correctly match our skin, hair, eye and lip colors. After we selected and applied the appropriate colors, we blended the pigments with water and brush to make the colors as even as possible. We then selected a single color for our backgrounds, so as to not distract from our portraits. Lastly, we finalized our portraits by adding shadows to five specific places on our faces: under the chin, under the lips, under the nose, under the eyes and under the eyebrows. The students worked very long and hard on these portraits and it shows! They look fantastic!

Ceramic Vessels
After many weeks and many requests, we finally began a clay project. We employed two different building methods to create our ceramic vessels. Some classes utilized the "coil building" method: the students rolled out small coils (like snakes or large worms) with our hands and stacked them upon one another in a spiraling fashion to create a vessel. Other classes employed the "slab building" method: the students rolled out a flattened slab of clay (much like rolling out pizza dough), embellished their slab with a design that they carved into the clay and then wrapped the slab around a mold of some kind to create a vessel. In this case, we used a bottle of Tempera paint wrapped in wax paper to create cylinders. The students then joined their cylinders to a smaller slab of clay to give their vessels bottoms.

Each method of building presented its own challenges and different results. The coil built vessels ended up being very organically shaped: undulating and bulbous with each vessel differentiated by its shape and glazing. The slab built vessels were more similar in shape yet varied wildly in their surface embellishment both in the form of the design carved into the clay and in the glazing. All of the vessels produced by the second grade classes turned out beautiful and (luckily) survived the firing process!!