Marz Jr. that is:) Marz Jr. is a New York based artist who focuses on cityscapes, comic books, and movies as the subjects for his artwork. The way he handles his subject matter was a perfect fit for the 4th graders' continued work with line and contrast. Before starting the project we reviewed how we made contrast and emphasis in the Petra Borner inspired project from last week. I pointed out that with that project we focused more on imagination and this week we would focus more on observation. Students read aloud from my Standards board- today I am..., so that I can..., and I'll know I've got it when... Then I shared Marz Jr.'s work with them. The kids loved looking at his work, especially the Star Wars imagery. What they noticed right away about most of his work was that the emphasized objects stood out because they were lighter in color value than everything else in the image. For our lesson, we focused on his cityscapes. We talked about what makes a cityscape a cityscape and then looked at numerous buildings from San Diego. As we looked at these, I showed students how to make building shapes look 3d with diagonal or curved lines. Students followed along using their dry erase boards to do sketches on. This was the first time we tried these out to practice, and I think they worked really well. I'm looking forward to using these for brainstorming and sketching throughout the year. After practicing, students were expected to draw at least 3 buildings in their final project. At least 2 of them needed to be from our San Diego examples. They could invent or borrow buildings from other places for other buildings if they wanted to. Students drew their buildings on a colored square and then drew their final building on a white piece of paper that was cut and glued in place to create the focal point of their drawing. Thanks also goes to Patty at Deep Space Sparkle for doing a project based on Marz Jr.'s work last year. The step by step I used is how she broke it down. I just added the hometown San Diego focus to the project:)
