Op Art

4th Grade: Op Art

4th Graders studied Op Art and Victor Vasarely. Vasarely was an Optical Art Artist in the 196O's. His art used various values from light to dark to fool the eye. It looked very three dimensional. We also looked at some fun traditional optical illusions. Many of those fooled the 4th graders! 

We did a step-by-step to draw the basic design of this fun Op Art. We used lots of fractions! To draw the wavy lines, we did "hills" and "valleys". I found out that it's better to draw all the "hills" first (in every other "pizza slice") and then to go back and draw "valleys" in the "slices" that were skipped. I also advice students to not draw "flat hills" or "flat valleys". This guided them pretty well. 

The next step was to fill in with marker reminding students to skip and color every other "stripe" and every other "slice". Then, students went back and took a second marker color for the skipped stripes. Finally, colored pencils or crayons were used to fill in a final layer of color in the skipped stripes. It helps the illusion if the colored pencil/crayon color is similar to the marker colors.

These are awesome 4th grade!