Animal Eyes, O'Keeffe Style

8th Grade

As always, students enjoy looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's amazingly large and fabulous flower paintings. They are intrigued with the detail work she found in the simplest of flowers OR landscapes she visited and painted of New York as well as New Mexico and Lake George. Not to be outdone, our students looked for the beauty in something as simple as an animal eye and focused in the detail of the eye as well as it's surroundings.

Students chose from old laminated calendar pictures looking at detail and possible compositional qualities. They make viewfinders out of Manila Paper just large enough to get the eye or part of an eye with some interesting composition around the eye (looking for color blending qualities as well as compositional lines).

Students were given 18x24" (45.7 x 61 cm) colored Construction Paper and were specifically asked to mix their colors on their painting as they worked instead of pre-mixing on their palettes. They were also asked to work (and think) in colors other than what they were seeing in their calendar pictures. Thirdly they were to experiment with different brush strokes. These pictures truly turned out breathtakingly beautiful and surprised even the painters themselves!

Animal Patterns

6th Grade

We began our discussion about patterns by looking around the room and then outside the windows. While talking about patterns in nature, we ventured into patterns found on animals... stripes, dots and spots, spotches, zig-zags, circles, diamonds, and others. Students were asked to create their own "animal pattern."

The differences between geometric and organic shapes were stressed and students could only use organic shapes by tearing each piece... no scissors used. They also had to have four layers plus the base layer somewhere within their design. Glorious patterns emerged during this lesson as you see below.

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