FIFTH GRADE . . . Our holiday traditions

Fifth graders shared their favorite holiday traditions with their sketchpad drawings! The ornament could represent a religious tradition they share with their family or it could represent a seasonal tradition such as something they do during the winter. We have a rich and diverse class of students in 5th grade and we learned so much about all of our friends through this drawing assignment.

Here are a few wonderful ornaments and symbols of the season for you to enjoy.

Happy Holidays everyone!!

Artwork by Elena

Artwork by Haeun

Artwork by Emerson

Artwork by Megan

Artwork by Trent

Artwork by Jessica

FIFTH GRADE . . . Winter personalities!

Fifth Graders celebrated the beginning of a snowy month by drawing a snowman in their sketchpads. The challenge was to give the snowman their personality. This meant animating the snowman, showing it doing something that the artist likes to do.

If you were a snowman, wouldn't you like to sing, play soccer or play the drums? Here are a few of our snowy friends in 5th grade who enjoy doing just that! To see all of our snowmen drawings, check out this link to our sketchpad assignments for December in Artsonia.com.   http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

Artwork by Jillian

Artwork by Jake 

Artwork by Jordan

Artwork by Ava P. 

Artwork by Priscilla

Artwork by Gianni

Note to families...
This art blog will be updated regularly with new posts sharing our daily activities in the art room and news about upcoming art exhibits. To respect the privacy of our students, names will always be limited to first name only and identifiable photos will never be accompanied with a name. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write in the comment box below or send me an email at blevine@ranneyschool.org. I would love to hear from you!
    In my class, students are given the chance to explore different materials and fun new techniques as they develop their signature style. Some young artists love to draw with a pencil, some like to paint on canvas or create images in a digital format, while others prefer working with clay and molding three-dimensional forms. In my classroom, we use a variety of materials allowing all artists to experiment and figure out which type of art they like the best. At Ranney School, we place a strong emphasis on originality and celebrate artistic differences, always nurturing and encouraging the imagination of every student.
     Remember to check out our display of finished artwork and student portfolios in the Ranney home page of Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

FOURTH GRADE . . . Drawing upside down

Why would an artist want to draw upside down? I don't suggest that an artist should stand on his or her head . . . but to draw an image that is turned around. It is a challenge for art students to learn how to observe the world as an artist does and see all the fine details of an image correctly. Drawing this way can trick your eyes into observing more of the fine details of the picture.

For example, when you look at a picture of a horse the regular way, your mind invariably takes over as you are drawing and you tend to draw what you remember how a horse looks, and not focus on the details in the picture in front of you. The image of the horse in your mind probably has an four thin legs as all horses do. But are you really seeing those legs as they appear in the picture, with all the angles and the lines?

Now look at this upside down picture of a horse. By turning the image around, we do not automatically see a horse, but a random design of angles and curved lines. It is much easier to notice how to draw the legs this way. Even the negative space in between the legs is easier to see and that can help us identify the shape of each leg.


Our drawings in class were created by looking at upside down photographs of wild animals in their natural habitat. This was a hard project for all of us but I am very proud of how accurate they turned out. Even the design in the colorful feathers and fur was a challenge to observe! Once we completed our drawings with pencil, we used blends of colored pencils to complete the scenes. To see all of our wildlife studies, click on this link to the Ranney home page on Artsonia.   http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

Artwork by Lily 

Artwork by Cristian

Artwork by Devin

Artwork by Zachary

Note to families...
This art blog will be updated regularly with new posts sharing our daily activities in the art room and news about upcoming art exhibits. To respect the privacy of our students, names will always be limited to first name only and identifiable photos will never be accompanied with a name. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write in the comment box below or send me an email at blevine@ranneyschool.org. I would love to hear from you!
    In my class, students are given the chance to explore different materials and fun new techniques as they develop their signature style. Some young artists love to draw with a pencil, some like to paint on canvas or create images in a digital format, while others prefer working with clay and molding three-dimensional forms. In my classroom, we use a variety of materials allowing all artists to experiment and figure out which type of art they like the best. At Ranney School, we place a strong emphasis on originality and celebrate artistic differences, always nurturing and encouraging the imagination of every student.
     Remember to check out our display of finished artwork and student portfolios in the Ranney home page of Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

FIRST GRADE . . . Landscape patterns

First graders finished their weavings using colorful yarn on a loom and learned all about making patterns with color. Following this lesson, we talked about landscapes and discovered ways to add patterns to our painted landscapes too.

A landscape is a type of artwork that shows an outdoor scene. Besides the land, the scene could include trees, flowers, mountains, a body of water, the sky, the sun, clouds, and anything else that could be seen outside. A landscape can also have animals, houses and even people. As long as the scene is about the land and not about one person in the scene, it would be considered a landscape.

Landscape by David Hockney

David Hockney at work

David Hockney is a working artist from England. We looked at some of his landscapes in our class and saw how he enjoyed working with color and patterns to fill his scenes. Inspired by the work of this famous artist, we took large white drawing paper and drew our own landscapes, using separate areas for the ground, the trees and the sky, and then added patterns to each of these areas. Here we are adding bright colors of paint to our scenes...

Posted with Blogsy

THIRD GRADE . . . Dancers on a stage

Third graders have completed their dancing figures in art class. Our figure drawing lessons began with the wooden artist model as we learned how to pose the human figure and draw each part of the body with correct proportion and movement. We then moved onto drawing a full dancing figure, and completed our figures with watercolors and colored pencils. Inspired by the work of Edgar Degas, our artists created a moving composition full of grace and beauty. To see all of our work, check out the full gallery of third grade artwork on Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

Here are a few examples to enjoy...

Artwork by Grace

Artwork by Akshay

Artwork by Rowan

Note to families...
This art blog will be updated regularly with new posts sharing our daily activities in the art room and news about upcoming art exhibits. To respect the privacy of our students, names will always be limited to first name only and identifiable photos will never be accompanied with a name. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write in the comment box below or send me an email at blevine@ranneyschool.org. I would love to hear from you!
    In my class, students are given the chance to explore different materials and fun new techniques as they develop their signature style. Some young artists love to draw with a pencil, some like to paint on canvas or create images in a digital format, while others prefer working with clay and molding three-dimensional forms. In my classroom, we use a variety of materials allowing all artists to experiment and figure out which type of art they like the best. At Ranney School, we place a strong emphasis on originality and celebrate artistic differences, always nurturing and encouraging the imagination of every student.
     Remember to check out our display of finished artwork and student portfolios in the Ranney home page of Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

KINDERGARTEN MOVIE !

In Kindergarten, we are learning that art can tell a story. In this video, we used a story by Eric Carle, "The Artist who Painted a Blue Horse," and added our own images and our own words.

For this painting project, Kindergartners learned how to use a big brush to mix colors directly on the page and a smaller brush to create the fine details of the background scenes. We also practiced our cutting skills by tracing the shape of our favorite animals and cutting them out of our painted papers to create our final collages. All of our paintings in this video are presented by the Kindergarten artists at Ranney School, Class of 2026. The video was created on the iPad, using the iMovie app. Enjoy!

SECOND GRADE . . . The Architecture of Ranney School

Second graders are creating illustrations of Ranney School in the winter. Inspired by the artwork of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), we saw how the amazing details of Rockwell's scenes helps to capture our interest and tells us a story about life in 20th century America. The image above is a street scene of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the town where he lived. Norman Rockwell not only included the buildings on Main Street in Stockbridge, but he filled his painting with people and cars passing by to give us a feeling of life in the town. We can also tell it takes place during December by the Christmas decorations on the buildings, the bare trees outside, and the snow on the ground.

The GPA

The Lower School Academic Complex
 

Looking at digital images of the buildings on our Ranney School campus, we noticed how many of our buildings have the same architectural style. Most start off with a rectangle and although some of the buildings have a flat topped roof, there is usually a triangle above the entrances to the buildings. Starting simple by drawing each structure with rectangles and triangles, and then adding all the special details, such as the windows and the columns, we were able to draw very recognizable buildings for our "street scene."

Artwork by Brooke 

Artwork by Anna

Artwork by Eric

 








Our Ranney campus would not be complete without trees, flag poles, school buses and kids playing on the grass. These are the details that make our scenes special and very much like a Norman Rockwell illustration. To color in our composition of Ranney School buildings on the page, we will add color by blending different shades of colored pencil over the pencil drawings as Eric started to do.




Note to families...
This art blog will be updated regularly with new posts sharing our daily activities in the art room and news about upcoming art exhibits. To respect the privacy of our students, names will always be limited to first name only and identifiable photos will never be accompanied with a name. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write in the comment box below or send me an email at blevine@ranneyschool.org. I would love to hear from you!
    In my class, students are given the chance to explore different materials and fun new techniques as they develop their signature style. Some young artists love to draw with a pencil, some like to paint on canvas or create images in a digital format, while others prefer working with clay and molding three-dimensional forms. In my classroom, we use a variety of materials allowing all artists to experiment and figure out which type of art they like the best. At Ranney School, we place a strong emphasis on originality and celebrate artistic differences, always nurturing and encouraging the imagination of every student.
     Remember to check out our display of finished artwork and student portfolios in the Ranney home page of Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

THIRD GRADE . . . Degas' Dancing Figures

Third graders followed up their lesson on figure drawing by creating another figure posed in motion, such as a dancer. For this project, we learned about Edgar Degas (1834-1917), a famous artist from France best known for his studies of ballerinas. Here are a few examples of his work. He was fascinated by the movement of the body and spent many hours studying the graceful poses in a dance studio.

Artwork by Gina

Students began their dancing figures with a step by step lesson on drawing a figure in motion. In this partial drawing, Gina drew the head, neck and body of her dancer and then added legs and feet, posed in a position that a dancer would stand in. The next step would be to add the arms and hands showing a graceful movement. Unlike our wooden artist model figures, these dancers are wearing clothing so we had to make sense out of how the arms and legs would look under a skirt or pants.

Artwork by Chantal

Artwork by Kris

These students completed their poses and added a simple indication of a face. Working first with the background, we painted a tone of color to the paper with a watercolor wash. Once these background colors dry we will be able to complete our projects by highlighting and adding color to our dancing figures.

KINDERGARTEN . . . Eric Carle Collages

Many of our students in Kindergarten are familiar with the illustrations and stories of Eric Carle books. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?” are examples of two of his most popular stories. Eric Carle’s “The Artist who Painted a Blue Horse,” is the book we used as the inspiration for our animal collage project.

To make our collages, Kindergartners painted large papers with two colors close to each other on the color wheel, such as red and orange, or blue and green. When the paint dried, students traced and cut the shape of their favorite animal out of the paper.  

Paper painted with orange and yellow

Cheetah cut out of the painted paper

The background was painted on another paper, using a much smaller brush and a much larger color palette. Putting it all together, we glued our animals over the background scene.

To see our finished collages, join us for an exhibition in Panther Hall gallery in honor of Grandparents and Friends Day!



Note to families...
This art blog will be updated regularly with new posts sharing our daily activities in the art room and news about upcoming art exhibits. To respect the privacy of our students, names will always be limited to first name only and identifiable photos will never be accompanied with a name. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write in the comment box below or send me an email at blevine@ranneyschool.org. I would love to hear from you!
    In my class, students are given the chance to explore different materials and fun new techniques as they develop their signature style. Some young artists love to draw with a pencil, some like to paint on canvas or create images in a digital format, while others prefer working with clay and molding three-dimensional forms. In my classroom, we use a variety of materials allowing all artists to experiment and figure out which type of art they like the best. At Ranney School, we place a strong emphasis on originality and celebrate artistic differences, always nurturing and encouraging the imagination of every student.
     Remember to check out our display of finished artwork and student portfolios in the Ranney home page of Artsonia.com.  http://www.artsonia.com/schools/school.asp?id=114839

FIFTH GRADE . . . Photographic illusions

Based on a drawing technique fifth graders learned last year, creating their portraits using a mirror image technique, artists this year used part of a picture from a magazine as their sketchpad assignment. The key to this project was to complete the part of the photograph using pencil and color so that the illustration becomes an extension of the image. It is hard to tell where the photo ends and the drawing begins with some of these sketches. Beautiful work everyone!

To add your thoughts, click on "Comments" below. The artists would love to hear from you!

Artwork by Isabella

Artwork by Claire

Artwork by Haeun

Artwork by Elena

Artwork by Myron

Artwork by Peter

Artwork by Lara

FIFTH GRADE . . . Take a seat!

Fifth graders drew an illustration of a chair in their sketchpads. The most successful drawings were made when the artist really paid attention to the shape of each part of the chair, including the legs and the negative spaces between the legs.

Fatima, Tatiana and Hubert each selected a chair that had both round shapes and straight lines.  The artists not only focused on the shapes of their chairs but also took their time to include the intricate designs carved into the wood. All of this detail gives us a realistic view of the chair they observed. We can appreciate the beauty of the furniture design and their beautiful rendition of it as well. What do you think of these drawings? Add your thoughts below by clicking on the word "comments" below.

Artwork by Fatima

Artwork by Tatiana B.

Artwork by Hubert