Age/Grade | Elementary 3

I am a fan of Haring Kids website and enjoy sharing it with people I know and children that I share my love of art with. This week, I taught some of my neighborhood kids (ages 4-11) about Keith Haring and his art. Each child created their own Haring inspired art work to take home with them.

As part of The Big Draw, a day of artist-lead drawing projects at Ivydale School in South London, illustrator Garry Parsons lead the Year 5 group in transforming the school reception area into Keith's POP SHOP, complete with house music and Haringesque badges to give away.

WE LOVE KEITH HARING!

The project was split into several lessons. At the beginning the pupils got some information about Keith Haring We created some colorful Keith Haring paintings on the break court in front of our school. There are now two big paintings, where the children can do hop-games. The other paintings show typical school subjects like art.

A fun project where kids paint Haring figures on aluminum foil.

Our 2nd graders did a fabulous job as they created these amazing pictures in the style of Keith Haring. We learned how to draw basic body shapes in proportion by drawing ovals. We drew an oval for the head, a bigger oval for the body, 3 smaller ovals for each arm, and then 3 ovals for each leg. We learned that our body only bends where we have a joint... in this case where two of our ovals met. We drew people doing all kinds of fun things. Ideally, the children drew figures doing something that was important to them... something they loved. Then we cut out our figures and glued them down. We tried to overlap the figures to show depth. This was a hard concept for the children to understand, but it was really interesting to see the results. Finally, we created some visual texture by making a beautiful patterned floor for our figures to dance on. I love the energy in all of these pictures. In the 2nd picture especially, you can actually see the children playing basketball. The overlapping in this piece of artwork provides so much depth to the picture.

Students at PS183 in New York, learn how to draw with wire, as part of the bodies in motion workshop

Students from this Montessori school in Canada studied Keith Haring and then worked collaboratively to make several murals, custom t-shirts, and sculptures, all exploring the theme of "Peace, love and the environment."

Using traditional portraiture methods of proportion, students explore and combine their knowledge with Haring-style, expressive, and colorful aesthetics to produce vibrant clay masks.

To download facial proportions sheet go to Visual Aids, use link on the right.

Elementary school students from Arkansas create a collaborative, large-scale project inspired by Keith Haring's subway art.

Haring's 2-sided mural on a handball court at 128th Street & 2nd Avenue in NYC overlooks the FDR drive. A public site that has brought much acknowledgement since it was painted in 1986. This lesson, organized collaboratively with The Children's Storefront gives local students the opportunity to examine and reflect on one of Haring's most influential landmarks.