26.2 Visual Arts: Media, Studio Safety, Artistic Development & Assessment
Key Takeaways
Elementary students should use only nontoxic art materials, such as products with the AP seal, and should avoid materials with cautionary (CL) labels.
Lowenfeld's stages progress from scribbling to preschematic, schematic, dawning realism, and pseudo-naturalistic.
Baselines, skylines, and repeated symbols are normal features of the schematic stage (about ages 7–9).
Perception develops through close observation, prior knowledge, imagination, and multisensory experience.
Portfolios, rubrics, sketchbooks, and critiques assess growth and help students reflect on their own work.
Overview & Exam Relevance
Competency 001 (Visual Arts) also asks teachers to:
- select techniques for creating art in various media (drawing, painting, printmaking, construction, ceramics, fiber art, and electronic media);
- understand how perception develops through observation, prior knowledge, imagination, and multisensory experience;
- understand how students develop cognitively and artistically; and
- implement instruction and assessment that are individually and age appropriate, and integrate art with other subjects.
This section covers art media and studio safety, the stages of children's artistic development, and planning and assessing art instruction.
Art Media, Techniques & Studio Safety
Elementary teachers must command the technical properties of varied art media while upholding non-negotiable safety standards to protect developing bodies from toxic chemical exposures.
Drawing and Painting Media
- Drawing Media:
- Graphite: Ranked on an international hardness scale from 9H (hardest, lightest lines, high clay content) to 9B (softest, darkest, deepest black lines, high graphite content). Elementary classrooms typically use standard HB pencils for drawing.
- Charcoal: Vine/willow charcoal (soft, easily erasable, ideal for gesture drawing) and compressed charcoal (dense, rich black, difficult to erase).
- Pastels: Soft/chalk pastels (powdery, blendable, creates airborne pigment dust; requires wet-wiping rather than blowing) and oil pastels (pigment bound with wax and mineral oil, brilliant, creamy, smudge-resistant, does not produce airborne dust).
- Painting Media:
- Tempera (Poster Paint): The foundational paint of early childhood and elementary classrooms. Water-based, opaque, fast-drying, highly blendable, and water-soluble for easy cleanup from skin and clothing. Non-toxic tempera cakes or liquid tempera provide vibrant color without toxic hazards.
- Watercolor: Transparent, water-soluble pigments pressed into dry cakes or supplied in tubes. Relies on the white of the paper to show through as highlights. Techniques include wet-on-wet (bleeding soft edges), wet-on-dry (crisp geometric edges), flat washes, and wax-resist (drawing with wax crayons or oil pastels before washing with watercolor; the hydrophobic wax resists the water-based paint, preserving line work).
- Acrylic Paint: Synthetic polymer emulsion paint. Water-soluble when wet, but dries rapidly into a permanent, water-resistant, flexible plastic film. Excellent for older elementary students (grades 4-6) working on canvas or wood, but permanently stains fabrics once cured; smocks and immediate water cleanup are mandatory.
- Oil Paint (Contraindicated for Elementary): Pigment bound in linseed oil. Requires toxic organic solvents (mineral spirits, turpentine) for thinning and cleanup, and cures through slow chemical oxidation over months. Oil paints and chemical thinners are strictly forbidden in elementary classrooms due to toxicity and inadequate classroom ventilation.
Printmaking, Sculpture & Ceramics
- Printmaking:
- Relief Printing: The raised surface of a matrix is inked and pressed onto paper, while gouged-out recesses remain un-inked. In elementary settings, safe relief matrices include carved styrofoam sheets (pressed with ballpoint pens), cardboard collagraphs (collaged low-relief textured materials), and carved potato or rubber stamps. Linoleum block carving with sharp gouges is reserved for upper grades, requiring bench hooks (wooden safety stops) and strict protocols to carve strictly away from the supporting hand.
- Monoprinting: A unique, single print created by applying water-based inks or tempera onto a smooth, non-porous plate (e.g., plexiglass or gel printing plates) and pressing paper on top to lift the design. Unlike relief or screen printing, monoprinting does not produce identical multiples.
- Sculpture:
- Additive Sculpture: Constructing a three-dimensional form by assembling, building up, modeling, or joining materials together (e.g., modeling clay, paper-mâché armatures, cardboard assemblages, found-object constructions).
- Subtractive Sculpture: Creating a form by cutting, carving, chiseling, or whittling away material from a solid mass (e.g., soap carving, soft plaster carving, wood carving).
- Ceramics and Clay Stages:
- Plastic: Wet, supple, workable clay capable of being modeled and shaped without cracking.
- Leather-Hard: Partially dried clay that maintains rigidity like firm cheese; ideal for carving details, hollowing forms, and joining components.
- Bone-Dry (Greenware): Completely air-dried, room-temperature clay that contains no physical moisture. Chalky, extremely brittle, and fragile. This is the only state safe for initial kiln firing.
- Bisque (Bisqueware): Clay that has undergone its initial firing in the kiln. Chemically transformed into hard, porous ceramic stone that can no longer dissolve in water; ready for liquid glaze application.
- Glazed: Bisqueware coated with liquid mineral glaze and fired a second time at high temperatures; melts into an impervious, glassy, colorful surface.
- Joining Technique (Score and Slip): To successfully bond two clay pieces together (such as attaching a handle to a mug), students must score (scratch deep cross-hatched grooves into both adjoining contact surfaces) and apply slip (watery liquid clay suspension acting as ceramic glue) before firmly pressing and smoothing the seams. Skipping this protocol causes joined pieces to crack and break off during shrinkage and firing.
Studio Safety and Environmental Health Standards
Elementary educators bear legal and ethical responsibilities to ensure that all studio materials, equipment, and cleaning practices conform to pediatric environmental health benchmarks:
- The ACMI AP Seal (ASTM D-4236): The Art and Creative Materials Institute (ACMI) awards the AP (Approved Product) Non-Toxic Seal to art supplies evaluated by board-certified toxicologists. The seal certifies that products contain no materials in sufficient quantities to be toxic, allergenic, or injurious to children, conforming to the federal ASTM D-4236 standard. Products bearing ACMI's CL (Cautionary Label) seal carry hazard warnings and should not be used with elementary students. Under the federal Labeling of Hazardous Art Materials Act (LHAMA), art materials with chronic-hazard warnings must state that they are inappropriate for use by children, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission advises elementary schools not to buy them for students in kindergarten through grade 6.
- Silica Dust Hazards in Ceramics: Natural clay contains crystalline silica. When dry clay scraps or powders are swept with a dry broom, microscopic silica particles become airborne. Inhalation of airborne crystalline silica causes irreversible lung damage (silicosis). Never dry-sweep or blow clay dust in an art room. All clay cleanup must be conducted using wet sponges, damp rags, and wet mopping of studio floors. Never allow elementary students to handle powdered dry clay or dry glazes.
- Ventilation and Solvent Elimination: Never permit aerosol spray fixatives, permanent solvent markers, aerosol spray paints, or petroleum-based solvents in standard elementary classrooms. If spray fixative is required on pastel drawings, it must be applied exclusively by the teacher in an exterior, outdoor environment or a certified industrial spray booth.
Stages of Artistic Development (Lowenfeld)
Viktor Lowenfeld, in Creative and Mental Growth (1947), described stages that children's drawings typically pass through. Ages are approximate, and children vary.
| Stage | Approximate Ages | Characteristics | Teaching Implications |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scribbling | 2–4 | Random marks become controlled scribbles; the child later names the scribbles ("This is my dog") | Provide large paper and thick crayons; value the process, not a product |
| Preschematic | 4–7 | First attempts to represent people ("tadpole" figures with a head and legs); objects float on the page; color chosen for appeal rather than realism | Encourage talk about the pictures; do not "correct" proportions |
| Schematic | 7–9 | Repeated symbols (schemas) for people, houses, and trees; a baseline at the bottom and a skyline at the top; X-ray views showing inside and outside at once; important parts exaggerated | Offer experiences that enrich schemas, such as observing real objects |
| Dawning realism (gang age) | 9–12 | More detail and overlapping; awareness of the peer group; increasingly self-critical of drawings | Teach techniques (overlapping, shading) to build confidence |
| Pseudo-naturalistic | 12–14 | Attention to realistic proportion, perspective, light, and shadow; strong self-criticism | Teach perspective and observational drawing; support risk-taking |
Exam tip: A second grader who draws a row of flowers standing on a line along the bottom of the page, with a strip of blue sky at the top, is showing the schematic stage.
Developing Perception
Perception develops through observation, prior knowledge, imagination, and multisensory experience. Teachers help students look closely at the environment and at artworks: touching textures, sketching leaves on a nature walk, describing what they notice before interpreting, and comparing how different artists show the same subject. Open-ended questions ("What do you see that makes you say that?") build critical thinking and creative problem solving.
Planning, Integrating, and Assessing Art Instruction
- Integration: Art connects naturally with other subjects: symmetry and tessellations in mathematics, observational drawings of plants and insects in science, cultural art forms in social studies, and illustrating stories or poems in ELAR.
- Choice and creativity: Offer open-ended prompts with several possible solutions rather than identical "cookie-cutter" crafts, which limit original expression.
- Assessment: Use portfolios to show growth over time, rubrics with criteria such as use of an element or principle, craftsmanship, and originality, sketchbooks or process journals, self-reflection prompts, and group critiques. The art TEKS include critical evaluation and response, in which students evaluate their own and others' work in portfolios and exhibitions.
- Display: Exhibiting student art in the school or community gives students an audience and builds respect for the work of others.
During a multi-week ceramic sculpture unit in a third-grade classroom, students produce clay pinch pots and small animal figures. At the end of the work session, dry clay residue and powdery scraps cover the linoleum work tables and the floor. According to established elementary studio health and safety guidelines, which cleanup procedure must the teacher mandate?
Assigning students to sweep the classroom floor vigorously with standard stiff-bristled brooms while using dustpans to collect clay shavings.
Using an electric household vacuum cleaner without a HEPA filter to rapidly collect dried clay powder from tables and floors.
Cleaning all table surfaces and tools with damp sponges and wet-mopping the studio floor to eliminate airborne crystalline silica dust.
Spraying an aerosol solvent fixative across the work stations to bind loose powder particles before blowing them off tables.
A second-grade teacher notices that most students draw houses, trees, and people standing on a line along the bottom of the page, with a strip of blue sky across the top and empty space between. According to Lowenfeld, which stage do these drawings represent, and what is an appropriate response?
The scribbling stage; the teacher should give students smaller paper.
The pseudo-naturalistic stage; the teacher should require accurate perspective.
The schematic stage; the teacher should accept the baseline and skyline as normal and enrich students' schemas with observation and new experiences.
The dawning realism stage; the teacher should correct the drawings so the sky meets the ground.
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