3rd Grade: Kandinsky Cities
3rd graders looked at Kandinsky's art on the whiteboard. We also watched a short video (Composition VIII and the Rite of Spring by Stravinski) on You Tube about one of his art works coming to life thanks to modern animation. This was set to Classical music. Kandinsky loved listening to classical music as he was painting. This art was inspired by the fabulous art over at Kids Artists:
Kandinsky of course, is one of the kings of great abstract art. He loved lines, shapes, colors. Davis student had lots to say about this kind of art. We answered the questions of: Why did he make this kind of art? What kinds of ideas did he have? What was his life like? What can you see in his art? Where are the focal points? We looked at his famous circle painting. Of course the art we made is more based on this-his circle painting. I think though, I've been inspired enough to do some more Kandinsky art next year on some of his art that is more similar to Composition VIII.
The art at the Kids Artists blog featured paint for the sky. However, I decided to have students do this in oil pastel instead of paint. Paint would be a lot harder to control when making concentric circles. Since I decided to do this with 3rd grade, oil pastel was a good choice. I made "tower templates" from cardstock. A set of 5 towers ranging in size were given to each student. Students traced the towers. Larger ones behind smaller ones. (so tracing the smaller ones first). Towers could overlap. Students then filled in towers with patterns with fine and ultra fine point Sharpie. Windows and doors were actually drawn first, then patterns. This "city" was then cut out. Students made the sky on a separate piece of cardstock. I showed students an excellent You Tube video (Wassily Kandinsky-Concentric Circles) on creating the circles. This was more in style of Kandinsky's original "Circle Painting", but the idea of blending colors got through to students. Students glued the city to the sky. (I helped with placement, as the final product is actually a bit longer than 8 x 11-see below). Students then fill in the "gaps" with more concentric circles. Finally, the whole piece is glued down to a 12 x 18 black paper for display.
This project was quite long-probably 3-4 art days (each being an hour). However, the students really got into it. And the Davis halls looked magnificent with all this amazing Kandinsky inspired art!
Great job 3rd grade!
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