A Name Art Project- A Wonderful Way to Start Your Visual Art Class

In anticipation of the coming school year I am hoping that I get to teach my own visual art. It is an area of the curriculum that I love and really enjoy teaching. 

In the Ontario curriculum for art we concentrate on the elements of design: line, colour, value, texture, shape and form, and space. I found a great resource for explaining the elements on this site. You should definitely check it out if you are teaching art this year.

This is a great project that could be used as a display for an Open House night and even double as the cover of our art portfolios.

Deep Space Sparkle had just the art activity I was looking for, Name Designs: Line Art...go take a look at this fantastic project to do with your class.

What an amazing site...so many ideas, techniques, supply lists. 

Everything you could ever need to teach art!

The last time I taught this lesson I started with a discussion on lines and patterns. 

My class and I looked at some art by Keith Haring, Van Gogh and others (multiple mediums) and discussed the moods, emotions and types of lines we saw. 

It was very interesting to talk to the kids about their impressions of the famous art works. 

Then we did a lesson on how to draw block letters and we practiced various size letters, shapes of letters and talked about the contours of the lines. Once we had spent a good deal of time on the block letters we moved on to different types of patterns we could create using lines... thick lines, wavy lines, round lines, thin lines...you name it. 

The students created a tic-tac-toe board on their practice paper and drew 9 or so different types of patterns. 

When we had finished that we did a gallery walk to get new ideas from what our classmates had tried. 

(This was my first art class gallery walk and I LOVED it!)

Now we were finally ready to start the project! I must say that the kids were focused, quiet and hard at work make their name projects.  

As a side note: my teaching partner thought this project would be way too hard for grade 4 but I disagreed and felt that if we teach high they will learn high...and I was right! 

 Here are some pictures of my students working away on a rainy Friday afternoon. Some are close to done, some are done and moved on to other line drawings but many are still in the process. 

I can't wait to see what they all look like when they are done and on display!

This student's name only has three different letters and they are all very angular, no curves. 

He has added a TONNE of patterns and I can't wait to see the finished product.

This is one of the finished ones! 

This student chose to use pencil crayons instead of markers for his letters. 

It's going to take more work to colour everything in so that it pops! but he is pretty determined.

This student used a ruler A LOT. 

It will be an interesting contrast to this students who worked free hand.

Click here to see the finished projects on display. 

(Grade 4 students)

Click here to see some more examples taken from a different year. 

(Grade 3 students)

This post was originally published in 2011.