Christine A. Elmore
In this section I will describe in detail the four art projects that my students will be involved in and which will serve as the culminating activity for this unit with the end result being a display of their work on the walls outside our classroom. Each project uses a different medium to work with but all will imitate Andy Warhol's style.
First Project
The first project is detailed in Lesson Plan 1 of this unit where my students will be asked to gather name-brand packages that they are familiar with. Together we will examine how advertisers' presentation of products attracts the consumer and discuss what the most popular foods for the "child of today" are. For this art project, which is included in the book Make It Pop! by Joyce Raimondo (14-15), I will ask each student to choose one famous wrapping of a food that they like to eat or drink, examine the label and logo and then begin to draw it with pencil on white paper. Further directions are given in the lesson plan itself.
Second Project
A second art project involves the student choosing a common object that can be broken into four parts (daisy, butterfly, car, etc.). With my help, he will make stencils of each of the four parts and then trace them on four different colors of construction paper (a great time to talk about complementary colors). After arranging the pieces in a mix-and-match way on four squares of different colored construction paper, the student will glue the pieces together and display them on a white paper divided into four equal sections, two on the top and two on the bottom.
Third Project
This project is perhaps the most ambitious of the projects we will do. It is detailed in a book called Discovering Great Artists by MaryAnn F. Kohl and Kim Solga (103) and is entitled 'Lots of Me!' Using a camera, I will take close-up pictures of each student and then use the enlargement option on the xerox machine to make six copies of the photo, each of which must fit on a 6" square of a 12" x 18" sheet of heavy paper. The student is then to use colored pencils and crayons to color each face differently. The copies may be positioned on the paper in various ways. The student then glues the six copies in place side-by-side on the large piece of paper, creating a checkerboard effect similar to Warhol's repeating image collage. During the course of my research I have discovered some other, more complicated versions of this project but suffice it to say that this one is appropriate for my young artists. Lesson Plan 3 describes how we would create a writing piece to accompany the self-portrait.
Fourth Project
This final project will use a subject dear to Andy Warhol's heart--the cat. Being quite familiar with my first-graders' nervousness in drawing anything freehand, I plan to use a step by step procedure as employed by Ed Emberley in his book Ed Emberley's Big Green Drawing Book to walk my students through the process of drawing a cat using a pencil and white paper. There are two drawings offered in his book. One is called "Prata Puss" (14-15) and the other "Cat A Log" (38-39). I will have them practice both and will also encourage my more adventurous drawers to try their own versions. Once completed, students will then outline the cat using a black marker and then use watercolor paints to fill in the entire cat. Unusual colors will be encouraged.