Artist in Residence Week

Last week, my students had the wonderful privilege of having an artist visit our school through a generous donation from Psi Iota Xi. "Artist in Residence" Justin Vining showed the students some of his methods for painting landscapes from life, which included painting almost everything with a 1/2" flat brush! He showed the students how to make skinny lines and wide lines with the same brush. After  some demonstrating in the classroom, we loaded our students up on a bus, and took a short field trip to nearby Adam's Mill to do some plein air painting. It was a blast!

Here are some results from 6th grade. All of the paintings are tempera on canvas.

Here are paintings by 5th graders:

3rd and 4th grade got rained out! Instead of taking a field trip to Adam's Mill, they painted barns here at school with our visiting artist. Justin Vining paints a lot of barns, so the students learned some of his special techniques, and painted a barn using what they learned. Here are some 4th grade barns:

And lastly, here are the 3rd grade students' barns:

At the end of the week, we hung all of the paintings on the walls of our elementary school, and had an art show on Friday night! Lots of families came to see the students' work. We had a really great week, thanks to the generosity of Psi Iota Xi!