Hokusai Fish Print Seascapes

Transitional Primary students pretended to travel across the globe to Japan to examine artist and print maker Hokusai famous for his artwork titled The Great Wave off Kanagawa.  We discussed the reoccurring theme of NATURE in his art and discussed how the important role fish played in Japanese culture.  Students learned about the tradition of Japanese fish printing called GYOTAKU and discussed how fisherman used this style of artmaking to keep track of the fish they caught.  We tried our own Gyotaku's, by printing on rubber fish.  Next, we learned how a seascape is a view of the sea and created our own, with oil pastel resist with watercolor.  Finally, our best prints were cut out and creatively incorporated into our seascapes.

The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai 1830-1833

Student Work

Fourth Grade Spells it Out!

We started off this year discussing how a TYPOGRAPHER is a type of artist that designs the way letters look to communicate a specific message.  We examined and were inspired by Barcelona based graphic designer Alex Trochut and American Pop artist Robert Indiana for this unit.  Students were challenged to illustrate the letters of their first name, nickname, or last name to express apart of their personality.  We explored a variety of watercolor pencil techniques such as blending, cross hatching, shading, making a wash and then applied them to our designs to make our letters look more three dimensional.  

Alex Trochut

Robert Indiana

Students started this project by completing the following worksheet below:

Additional Student Art Examples