Zentangles

4th Grade: Zentangles

I officially named this project: "I've Been Tangled" (at least that is what the lesson plan says!). There was lots of "tangling" in the art room in 4th grade for the past few weeks! Students learned all about Zentangle art and Zentangle artists. Zentangles allow the artist lots of creative freedom, but also have structures to them. Zentangle art is formed within an image, either representational or abstract/non-representational. Students could create their own contour image for this project or trace their hands/fingers or use a box of reference pictures. Lots of choices! We also talked about patterns. There were many pre-existing zentangle patterns online that I let students try their hand at. I also let students create their own patterns...again more artistic choices. We did talk a lot about strong contrast..having lots of "filled" areas (which are made by using black sharpie pen/marker). This creates an overall pleasing zentangle. A lot of 4th grade artists blended their own images with references images, which I always encourage if they want to do that. This is something I'd been wanting to try for awhile..and so glad I did..I think this art is just amazing!! The background is a watercolor wash-wet-on-wet colors. I was out of any yellow paint (unfortunately), but I think the colors we did have works very nicely-blue, green, magenta, red, orange and violet.

AWESOME ZENTANGLE ART 4th grade!!!