Moody Artists

One of the artistic standards that the kids have to work on is to create an artwork to represent mood. They were open to different media: charcoal, pastel, or watercolor. The only requirement was that they did a scene from nature. They could have buildings but to avoid doing people. The reason for that was so that they didn't have faces with expressions to create mood, rather style and color. I love that Dylan did this charcoal drawing of a lighthouse. Charcoal is a particularly difficult medium and he did a spectacular job with his lighthouse.

A lot of the kids chose pastels to work with, like Austin here. He was going for a peaceful mood, with the rocks and water. I love that color blue!
Teressa's mood choice was happy. She used the brightest colors in the palette and had a nice focal point of the red flower with the sunset in the back.
Bradley also was working on a sunset piece, but he said he was going for sad which I was surprised by since orange is such a bright, uplifting color.
Johnny was at a different table than his sister, but he went for the bright flowers as well. Van Gogh eat your heart out. Mood: 'super happy'.
Seth was doing "pink tornadoes" and "orange hurricanes". Mood: use your imagination.

After everyone was finished, the kids had to go around and guess what mood was being depicted. We were pretty on-target for most of them. I really liked having very loose 'rules' and the freedom of expression they all came up with. When I first started teaching them art, the kids really wanted to be told what to do. If they were given a task to just create something, they would stare at the paper. This task showed me just how much they had grown as artists as there was no hesitation in either their choice of medium or their subject matter. They all just dove in! It was pure magic to watch.