Wayne Thiebaud: Pop Art Cakes with Light & Shadow

• Wayne Thiebaud was a figure in the Pop Art movement. His work takes something ordinary from everyday life or Pop Culture (usually cakes) and tries to make you look at it in a different way that raises it to the level of fine art. His exaggerated shadows are an homage to the advertising industry.
• Students created the cakes by studying how to render the 3 dimensional cylinder as a 2 dimensional drawing.
• The light effects were created by painstakingly creating a gradation from light to dark along the curved edge of the cake. The cast shadows then had to be made in agreement with the shadin on the surface of the cake. 

Josef Albers: Homage to "Homage to a Square"

• Pre-K learned about the life of Josef Albers, an artist who approached art like a science experiment. He created thousands of paintings of squares in an attempt to capture the ways colors change when placed in different combinations with one another.
• Each set of squares shares the color red as a common element with different colors set within or around it. Students learned the concept of "concentric" shapes.  

German Expressionist Landscape

• German Expressionism was an art movement that focused on using color non-naturalistically to express emotion. Students learned how the invention of photography allowed artists to abandon representation an explore new ways of representing the world around them.
• We learned the parts of a landscape (foreground, middleground and background) and colored using only primary colors, which were then mixed to create a wider color palette.