Jim Dine -- All Grades

It happened - Jim Dine invaded the art room!  Hearts are everywhere!

Due to my district's schedule and a snow day - my Monday kids are a WHOLE unit behind everyone else, so I am filling my Friday schedule with some quality one day art lessons.  I hadn't really planned on using Jim Dine, but he kept popping up on art blogs and pinterest that I couldn't ignore his amazing hearts any longer!

So, off I went to google to find and save images of Jim Dine's many marvelous hearts to make a slide show.  I talked a little bit about the Pop Artist before the slide show, and explained to the students that their job during the slideshow was to find something about his work and raise their hand.  They could raise their hand when they knew a color, a texture, what the subject was, something all the pictures had in common, something the pictures didn't have in common or anything they observed.  I made sure to wait till ALL hands had something to share.  I called on students until anyone that wanted to share got to share at least once.

Next, I explained their job was to create their own version of a Jim Dine heart.  I broke down and wrote on the board what choices they needed to make:
1) How many hearts? (We talked about any number they were willing to color: 1,3,7,59)
2) What colors? (random, hot/cold, favorite, sport team colors, school colors)

Then we discussed what they needed to have no matter the number of hearts or colors:
1) Whole paper filled with color.
2) Coloring with purpose and not scribbling in whole thing.
3) Using the TIP of the oil pastel and NOT the side (sides don't have as much color and the coloring goes far too fast)

I passed out paper and oil pastels and let them to it.  I let students get pencils if needed, but I encouraged them to jump in with oil pastels.

These turned out great!  I had some students struggle with the freedom of this project, but most of them loved doing it and asked to do more than one.

Now, in classes that had more time to work I offered another step to students that wanted it.  I let them "batik" their papers.  Now, this isn't a true batik as we didn't use wax resist and plan out our colors lightest to darkest.  Instead it is more of a inspired look from batiking.  Those that wanted to crumpled their paper into a ball, then smoothed it back out - they did this 3 times.  On the their crumple students kept it in a ball, dunked it in watered down black paint, rinsed it in the sink, blotted it dry.

I let students pick if they wanted to do the last step because the idea of crumpling your work is too much for some students to handle - though MOST of my students were excited about being a little rebellious.