Art Class: Showing Textures

This past Thursday was our once-a-month art class.  A parent volunteer comes in on the first Thursday of every month and teaches an art class for about an hour or so.  This parent is an amazing artist {check out his work at Lilyworktile.com}, and he has done some awesome projects with the kids.

This week, the lesson focused on using lines to create texture in our art.  Since we had previously talked about different types of lines, it was easy to talk about how those lines could be used to show texture.

Mr. Halferty choose several students to come feel an object hidden in a paper bag.  The student then had to describe the object.  This allowed the students to think of lots of texture words which he then listed on the board.  After feeling all the objects, the students brainstormed other texture words to add to the list.

 

Next, Mr. Halferty demonstrated on the board how some of those textures could be drawn using lines.  

Then, each student was told to pick three texture words that they were going to portray using pieces of clay.  They wrote their three words on pieces of cardboard.  {We did have some weird choices along the way that we had to discourage - words like weird and tasty don't really describe textures!}

Finally, we passed out the pieces of clay to each child, and they started creating.  We had lots of different tools for them to use - pencils, paintbrushes, pieces of paper towel, dowels, erasers, sponges, and anything else they could think of.  It was a hard task for the younger students, but they put lots of effort into it.  

The students were pretty proud of their finished tiles {and so was I}.  The best part is that Mr. Halferty took the tiles home to glaze them and fire them for the students which means that each student will end up with three finished tiles to display in their homes!