MS Artists Study Bones with O'Keeffe

I recently introduced the 7th graders to Georgia O'Keeffe's style of painting and her favorite subject matter, bones, flowers, & landscapes. Although students didn't appear impressed by her life's accomplishments, fortunately, they did seem to appreciate her paintings of bones and flowers. I borrowed a few delicious items from the science dept (skulls of many mini-sized animals, etc!) and HS art dept (a real bull skull with horns and a plastic/fake human skull) and a student in class volunteered to bring in his valued, deer skull. Thanks Kyle!
We got strait to work practicing first with charcoal and chalk as a warm up. When students seemed ready, I had them draw as realistically as possible, focusing mainly on enlarging (like O'Keeffe) and cropping the skulls, and bones they were observing. Some exotic shells were also added to the mix...
We then did a value study with the charcoal, demonstrating all the shades of black we could get, I also had them test how many different line qualities they could achieve with the charcoal on a different sheet of paper. After all the little studies, we ventured onto mixing the charcoal with paint to see what we could get. The students did a really nice job with the new materials, but I think they liked working up close and personal with DEM BONES!
See some students at work below and I will post some finished works later this week...