Peter Max Patriotic Paitings

One of our power grade level expectations was to have fifth graders study patriotism in art. Immediately I thought of Peter Max, who was a household name in the 1960 & 1970's for his bright bold colors and hippy love art. He was THE artist of the hippy movement. Students started out by watching some videos of Peter talking about his work. Here is the link for the video roll on You Tube that I showed the kiddos.

I also had Peter's book: For them to look through. They LOVED his bright colors.

Next, we learned how to use the wet-in-wet technique with tempera paints. We used a poster-board weight paper and it is a good thing because the paper was so heavy with paint, I am not sure 80 lb drawing paper would have held up.

I showed students how to dip their brush in one pure color and then in another and paint without mixing the two to create a swirly wet-in-wet effect. Here is what the paint trays ended up looking like:

Students came back another day and began to learn about the statue of liberty. I split them into groups and they each got a book about the statue. Some were fiction (with elements of history), and some were non-fiction. They each assembled a list of facts about the statue. Then, I pulled out some clip art of the statue I found on google images. Here is the search I did. Each was about 3x5" printed in black & white. The kids used tracing paper to trace the statues. Even with tracing, each one looked very different!

The kids then used gloss medium to glue down the transparent pieces of  tracing paper drawings. The result was very cool!

At the end, we reflected on why the statue made us feel patriotic. Each student wrote one or two sentences, which I displayed with the work.

(stay tuned for the final work pics!)