Animals in cubism

Who doesn't love studying the cubist artists?  Picasso, Braque, Duchamp and Hockney are some of the greatest artists of this field.  We started by looking at Hockney and how he used photography to create a modern cubism style.  So I had them take cameras and using 15 images they had to piece together a work of art in the style of David Hockney photography projects.

Connor K. 

Jacob G. 

After working with cameras and computers, we switched gears and moved on to working with cubism and oil pastels.  I tried something new this year, you know us art teachers can never do the same project year after year.  So this year I had them find the image of an animal online, had them copy it and paste it into a word document and blow the image up as large as they could, and then hit print.  I then had them lay the image over a 12x12 piece of paper and had them trace it with a pen.  We found the tracing worked easier if you put a magazine under the project.  After they traced the image I had them use a pencil to find the indented lines that the tracing had created in the paper under their copy.  Then I had them shift the copied image and made them trace it again.  Again they found the indented lines and then I had them move it again and do the tracing process all over again.  We found that three tracings was plenty.

After they had found all of the indented lines, I had them break up the background with whatever lines they wanted to use.  I then had them color each area with gradation color like the cubist artists used.  We used oil pastels and the majority of them used baby oil and qtips to help smooth out the color when they were done.

Nikole K.

Heidi S.

Abby K.

Holly S.

These are the best examples, but we did learn that you have to be careful how you move or rotate the image as to not get it too busy in the middle.

Also, some of them had to print the picture twice, because they would trace so hard with the pen that they would pop holes into the copied paper.