Art With Mrs. Dennis: Pop Art

For those of you who are frequent readers, you are aware that I also teach visual art. Last year the fifth grade classes studied rotational symmetry and painted these beautiful canvases to hang in our new entry way.

http://musicwithmrsdennis.blogspot.com/2014/06/art-with-mrs-dennis-rotational-symmetry.html

We decided to continue this as a tradition. The 5th grade will complete an art project each year to dedicate to the school as they leave and move on to middle school. This spring, the fifth grade classes studied Andy Warhol's pop art. We chose our mascot, the Viking, as the focus of the art. We completed these right before I had my youngest son. Now, I'm back from maternity leave and finally got a chance to hang them in our front office. They are a wonderful splash of color welcoming our visitors! Go Vikings!

Update:

I hope to clarify any questions you may have regarding the process to create this art. I designed the Vikings on the computer and was able to play around with color schemes. I also printed out a coloring sheet for the students to experiment and I used some of their choices for inspiration. 

When the color scheme was chosen, I displayed a black line version of the Vikings on the projector screen. I propped each canvas on a student desk and cardboard box in front of my white board until it was at a comfortable height for tracing. I resized the Viking rectangle to fit the canvas and traced the black lines with pencil. 

We used acrylic paint. I had a color copy which I used to assign paint jobs to students. About four students at a time would be called to the back of the class while everyone else was working on other art projects. Each person in 5th grade got to paint for at least 2 minutes. I would assign them a small section and color. For example, I may tell two kids to paint the beard on one canvas green. I set an alarm on my phone to keep track of the time. Even if they didn't get their section done in time, they knew they had to pass the brush to the next person when my phone beeped. We had approximately 80 fifth graders this year.  Many of the colors needed two coats before we finished. I painted the black lines when the colors were finished.

The paint and canvases were purchased from Hobby Lobby by PTO. I can't remember the exact total, but the entire project was under $30. This size canvas comes in 2-packs for $8. The acrylic  paints were about 50 cents for each bottle. We used 2 bottles of each color.

If you have any more questions, I'd be glad to answer them.