Kindergarten Jackson Pollock Paintings

I introduced my kindergarteners to Jackson Pollock by showing them this student-made video that I found on YouTube. They were intrigued by the fact that he painted with his canvas on the floor and that he got his paint all over everything.

I bought ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles at the dollar store and filled each bottle with a different color of tempera paint. I added a little bit of sand to each bottle and mixed it up.

I took the students into the courtyard right outside of my art room and showed them how they were going to lay their paper on the floor and squirt paint onto their paper. Then I demonstrated how to pick up their paper with 2 hands, so that they didn't get themselves completely covered in paint (not sure that mom would appreciate us completely embodying the Pollock style). They then would move on to another color and squirt that onto their paper, repeating the entire process until they had every color on their paper.

The interesting thing, was how long some of the paintings took to dry! I hadn't thought of this and there were a couple of classes that really loaded their papers with paint and their papers took 3 days to fully dry!

For the next class, they added even more textures to their paintings. I gave each table a variety of ribbons, foam shapes and confetti and showed them how to glue it onto their paintings, trying to spread everything around the entire page.

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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

Prekindergarten Jackson Pollock Paintings

This was probably my favorite project that my PreK students did this year! We looked at paintings by Jackson Pollock. This was something new for them. They were used to being able to "see" something in the artwork. I heard words like "ugly", "weird", "messy". There were some very strong reactions to what they saw- exactly what I was looking for!

I put large pieces of white paper (18 x 24) on the floor. My room was covered in paper! I spread them out so that the students had enough room.

I showed the students how they were to dip their brush into the paint (for this I used fluorescent tempera) and then let the paint drip onto the paper. I stressed that I did NOT want the brush to touch the paper. This was hard for them. So I showed them how I wanted them to stand up tall over their paper and hold their brush. If they were standing up, they could not touch their paper.

I let them get started with 1 color of paint and then I started rotating around the room, switching the colors until everyone had used every color. My PreK classes come with an assistant, so I had help with this part. It was still a little crazy. I need to figure out a more organized way to switch the paint. Suggestions from anyone??

Warning! By the end of class, my floor was covered with paint. However, my little ones LOVE cleaning, so I passed out wet towels and set them loose cleaning up the floor once all of the papers were picked up. The mess was cleaned up in less than 5 minutes! Pin It