During our 3rd Quarter art classes, every student in every grade studied and then created a different form of sea life to be exhibited during the Spring 2020 Pima County Fair. I am SO PROUD of all of our hard work. I want to show it off even if it can't be on display at the fair this year. So, without further ado, welcome to our virtual "Under the Sea Art Gallery". Please enjoy!

Under the Sea Gallery

Look for your artwork in your class gallery!

Kindergarten artists read the book The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. We then learned how to draw our own fish friends, outlined with them Sharpie, painted them with watercolors and decided the best place to add glitter for one glittery scale. After that, our fish friends needed an ocean backdrop. To create our ocean backgrounds, we used recycled cardboard tubes dipped in paint to stamp circular "bubbles" on our blue paper. Check out our Rainbow Fish Friends!

(Galleries from left to right: Mrs. Newsham's class and Ms. Lakavage's class)

1st Grade artists learned how to draw open mouthed sharks in profile for their Under the Sea exploration. Once we had practiced drawing our sharks a few times with pencil, it was time to dive in and make our final drafts! We outlined our sharks in Sharpie marker, erased the leftover pencil, and painted with watercolors. 1st grade artists could paint their sharks with whichever colors they felt looked best. This allowed for all the different patterns and variations. Next, we needed an ocean background. We learned how to print "bubbles" on white paper by painting directly on sheets of bubble wrap to print its bubble pattern. Once the sheet of bubble wrap was covered with wet paint, we placed our papers on top of the sheet and gave them a gentle rub. We pulled our papers away to reveal a bubble background for our sharks! We cut out our painted sharks, glued them to our backgrounds and voila! our finished masterpieces. Take a look!

(Galleries from left to right: Ms. Purdy's class and Mrs. Weidler's class)

2nd Grade artists studied and created woven jelly fish! We used bright neon colors throughout this unit to simulate the fluorescent colors seen in jellies in the ocean. We used paper plates cut in half and painted with neon Qwik Stix to create the "bell" of the jellyfish. In addition to cutting a curvy line on the bottom our plates to create a realistic jelly shape, we cut 7 slits on the upper edge and one on the bottom so we could turn a plain paper plate into a loom to weave our jellies. The artists then "warped" their jelly looms with a long piece of string and wove shorter strings ("weft strings" in weaving terms) throughout their newly created loom to make the tentacles. We have SO much fun weaving. We focus on making sure to follow an "ABABAB" or " under over under over" pattern while we weave to get the correct texture. As an added touch we created a dark bubble background for our jellies to live on. We painted blue paint on sheets of bubble wrap, placed black construction paper on top of the paint, rubbed the paper gently and pulled it away to reveal our bubbles! The woven jellies are mounted on their background paper to create a stunning jellyfish masterpiece. I adore them and I hope you do too!

(Galleries from left to right: Mrs. Cain's class, Ms. Drew's class, and Mrs. Hoey's class)

3rd Grade artists studied sea horses, sea weed, collage, and zen tangling drawing techniques to create their Under the Sea works of art. We broke this project down into many steps beginning with learning how to draw a sea horse. After we mastered that, we used black pens to practice many different "zen tangle" designs to apply to our sea horses. To color our creations we used bleeding tissue paper and let the colors from the tissue seep into our drawings giving a bright underwater effect. Next, we needed to create sea weed for our horses to cling to. We painted paper using blue and yellow paint to make our own green and when our papers were dry, we used white pastels and simple lines to make sea weed shapes. We cut out all the different elements and used collage to compose our seascapes. Once our pieces were arranged to our liking, we glued it all down and picked out a background color that would show off our hard work. I couldn't be happier with our results! (Galleries left to right: Mrs. Brown's class and Mrs. Thompson's class)

4th Grade artists worked with many new techniques to create their underwater silhouettes. These techniques include: drawing sea life and creating a flat silhouette from these drawings, practicing mixing white paint into various blue colors to create tints, and using rubbing alcohol and liquid watercolors to create a painterly background to show off all of our new skills. We drew and cut out our sea animals from black construction paper. We had a painting day where we mixed white and blue together for our various blue tints. This helped to create the illusion of light underwater in order to silhouette our sea creatures. Once the flat black sea drawings were cut out and glued to our tinted canvas, the last step was to make a beautiful watercolor background. We painted an entire sheet of white paper with cool colored watercolors and then dripped small amounts of rubbing alcohol onto the wet color. We observed how the alcohol effected the water in the paint. The rubbing alcohol and paint mixture gave us a gorgeous, flowing, water effect. Just what we were looking for!

(Galleries left to right: Mrs. Locke's class and Mrs. Hill's class)