We are gearing up for a very exciting year in elementary art. To start off, we are working through an elements of art bootcamp to brush up on our basic skills: painting, cutting, gluing, assembling, etc. We are reviewing some of what we learned last year and making sure we are ready for our upcoming marathon.
Last week, we covered line and texture.
I have two lessons a week with the younger ones, so we spent one day on each element (for the older ones, we have to fit in two elements per lesson and it is a bit more hectic).
As they came into the art room, I donned a lab coat. Facing a slew of questions from the start, I announced that we were investigating and experimenting with texture and therefore had to wear appropriate attire (I had to get them excited about wearing artist smocks somehow!) I had a table of objects at the front covered with a cloth. A few brave volunteers came up to feel underneath the cloth, describing to the class what they felt. We briefly discussed different words we could use for texture: soft, rough, scratchy, bumpy, fluffy… this activity went much better with the second graders who had more English.
We looked at examples of artwork that showed texture and described the types of mark making we saw- textures created using line…. huh! Then it was off to the table to conduct experiments of our own.
Gateway Art 