5th Grade: Chinese Landscapes or Shan shui (Chinese: 山水 lit. "mountain-water")

For our 5th Grade cultural unit, we learned about the art of a different culture.

Essential questions for this unit include:
"How is traditional Chinese painting different than how we are used to painting?"
"How can I combine brushstrokes to form images from nature?"

Practicing value in different media is a core part of the 5th grade curriculum. Value connects with the Renaissance and realism. Value changes are one way to make a work of art look realistic. The I can statement for this unit was “I can use bamboo brushes and make a landscape using various values of black and gray.”

 First the students practiced four types of brushstrokes: 

1. thin;
2. thin-thick-thin;
3. thick-thin and
4. thin-thick.

Next they looked at landscape elements in Chinese landscape paintings and practiced making them on newsprint.

They watched a video by The Helpful Art Teacher to learn about parts of a Chinese landscape including, the heart, paths and the threshold.

After practicing, they made their good landscape painting using sumi ink on white paper. They framed their pieces to look like an oriental scroll. The final step was to design a chop and carve the design onto a foam block. They used the chop to sign their artwork on the front using red block printing ink.

 

To see more art works from this project visit Artsonia here. Students are taking their own pictures, but class time is short and we run out of time to do them all. If you want to volunteer to take photos for Artsonia, please contact me.