Fifth Grade Schapiro's Shapes

Materials Needed

• sketchbooks
• watercolor paper
• watercolors/brushes
• fadeless construction paper/neon paper
• glue
• scissors
"High Stepping Strutter"- Miriam Schapiro
"Free Falling"- Schapiro

"Anna and David"- Schapiro

We started the project by looking at a variety of artworks by Miriam Schapiro, focusing on her pieces that used the human figure. We took notice of the use of space and how the figure takes up the entire space. We talked about different actions that we could demonstrate with our figures: running, cheerleading, basketball, ballet, etc. and what positions the different parts of the body would be in.
The students used the wooden manikins that I have in my room to draw 2 figures, each showing a different motion. They had to think about the proportion of the different body parts and what position they should be in. Would the leg be perfectly straight or slightly bent?

When they finished these, we looked at the artwork of Jackson Pollock and talked about how he created some of his more well-known pieces. Then they did a quick splatter paint background using liquid watercolors (my new favorite! I have given up using the pan watercolors- we go through them too quickly and the colors are not nearly as vibrant). I showed them how to control the splatter by tapping their paint brush onto their other hand. By doing this, we had a minimum of clean up. I let them use as many colors as they wanted and the backgrounds turned out to be works of art in themselves.

I had the students make an origami envelope for the next part. They used this to hold all of the pieces that they cut. I asked them to cut out all of their pieces and put their person together first without doing any gluing. That way they could make sure that they had the right proportions, colors, placement, etc. They stored their pieces inside of their envelope for the next class.

When they had all of their pieces ready, they began gluing everything down onto their splatter paper. They used all of the scrap pieces (we didn't throw anything away!) to cut out decorations. I had hole punches on hand for them to use, they cut zig zags, etc. I basically told them to go CRAZY with the decorations.

They ended up looking amazing and we used these to move into a 3D project where the students made a plastercraft sculpture of their figure.

Vocabulary:


space, proportion, movement Pin It