Fab Flamingos.

I blogged a ways back about some of our Dali projects in development, one of which was my Second graders' project based on Dali's The Elephants.

The Elephants, 1948

I was really trying to drill home our two Art Smart words "exaggerate" and "overlap" with this project, so I wore the words every class for the entire lesson to remind the students to use these techniques in their final products.  After all, no lesson is complete without some weird accessory attached to me, right?

After looking at some examples of Dali's works, I "read" my students Flora and the Flamingo by Molly Idle.  Now I say "read" because the book is wordless, but we could not get enough of the story.  As a lover of all things flamingo, I am in LOVE with this book.  My students loved narrating it as we flipped through it together and studied the flamingo's poses.

We got to work creating the backgrounds with tempera and salt first, then created painted paper with two tones of light and dark for the flamingo bodies and wings.

Next class, we used eyedroppers with watered down black tempera to create the exaggerated Dali-esque legs.

 

Then we cut out the bodies, beaks, wings, etc. and glued them down carefully as the black leggies were still pretty wet.

Final details of google eyes and feathers were added last.

Love the legs on this one!

Have a Fabulously Flamingo Friday!

It Just Got Surreal.

How many Salvador Dali's does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Clock.

Welllll, this joke went way over the heads of my elementary students (like much of my off-the-wall humor does), but I will say, this whole wearing a costume or accessory thing is FAB-ulous.

My students are stunned into silence (maybe a little bit concerned about my sanity too) from minute one.  BEST classroom management tool ever.  

Total twinsies, right?

Best part about my costuming this year, is that the kids are getting into it.  This little friend below was proud to show me his mustache sweatshirt he purposely wore on Art day.

Before kicking off the artist intro, my kiddos were given a few minutes to design their own mustache, which naturally they had to wear for the rest of the day.  Tell ya what, it is SERIOUSLY hard to guzzle coffee with a 'stache.  I had coffee all over my smock!

Surrealist art is our focus this month, so we continued with a little Dali up in this Art Room.

I forgot how totally wild Dali's paintings are...and I also forgot how many undressed ladies there are in his paintings.  One of my fourth grade artists paged through a Dali book at her own home to do some research and (thank the art gods) is a totally mature student, and quietly reported to me that she found some cool paintings, but "gosh, Miss D., there were a lot of ladies without clothes."

Therefore, Miss French Fry had to do some serious combing of images before presenting them to her students.

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

The Elephants, 1948

Check out our 4th grade finished works below:

 

Those are some vicious carrot-chomping teeth right there.

What a shifty-eyed selfie, am I right?

Annnd the 2nd grade's Dalis in development:

Okay, no more dilly Dali-ing for me.  Off to update my CPDUs online, ugggh.  I don't know what your state's Education website looks like, but Illinois' is super dull.  They really should have hired an Art teacher to jazz up their page, so it's at least a little fun to look at...