Art, craft & design lesson plans & art resouces
The Paul Carney arts website is packed with art resources and art lesson plans for teaching art at all stages of education. All of these lesson plans and resources are given to you free of charge in the hope that the pupils in your classes will benefit from high-quality art education. They have been designed to the highest standards by me from over twenty years of art teaching experience. I also design bespoke art and design curriculums for both Primary and Secondary phases at a reasonable rate. Email me for details.
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Media Art
Ages 11-16
Pop Art gets a 21st Century facelift! This a Contemporary Scheme aimed at improving thinking skills and asks deep, Essential Questions of your students to learn how Modern Art has evolved into a thriving contemporary movement. And instead of just making a bland Pop Art style picture, the students are challenged to think about how the media affects their life.
Expressive Painting
Ages 11-16
Expressive Painting Formal Elements: Age 10-16 FULL Contemporary Scheme inc. thinking skills. Improve your student's painting techniques whilst learning the FORMAL ELEMENTS of art. Using Essential Big Questions this FULL Unit of Work is beautifully designed to challenge and stretch your students
Dreams
Ages 11-16
This lesson teaches Photoshop by means of a detailed step-by-step exercise. You can use free online software if you don’t have Photoshop (links included.) There is also a detailed guide to drawing faces from observation. The skills are then combined into a fun Dream project. This is especially liked by the boys
Macro Art
Ages 7 -16
Suitable for most age ranges, this very flexible project combines digital photography with the art of observational drawing. It is a great project for getting some quality, expressive drawing work in student’s portfolios at exam stage or for teaching younger students to ‘see’ more closely. A very expressive lesson
African Mask Making
Ages 7-16
Suitable for most age ranges, this very flexible mask making project leads your students through deep, web based investigation of the Dogon Tribe in Mali, to fully understand the reasons masks and ceremonial costumes are made, before providing a wealth of resources on mask design and mask making. Download
Me in a Box
Ages 10-14
This project is a lovely twist on the traditional art theme of identity or portraits. It uses symbolism and metaphor as well as Maths NETS to create inspirational designs on a personal theme. My own students LOVED this lesson!
Funny Fish
Ages 7-12
Complete with beautiful supporting illustrations, a teaching Powerpoint and detailed Lesson Plan with full instructions, this 4-6 hour project teaches students to illustrate fish in detail using cross-hatching pen and ink techniques, before inventing their own weird and crazy fish Download
Alien Landscape
Ages 7-12
The Alien Landscape project comprises: Lesson Plan, Powerpoint resources and handouts. It will show your students the principles of landscape drawing and painting, colour, depth of field, tonal range and scale in an enjoyable and stimulating project that young people enjoy.
Tints & Shades
Age 7-14
Improve your student's painting techniques by completing this range of worksheets for tints and shades.
Colour Theory
Age 7-14
Some teachers prefer to embed colour theory into projects but this stand alone worksheet & powerpoint is great to have.
Impressionism
Age 7-14
A lovely project that teaches colour mixing by practical application. The students study famous paintings by the Impressionists.
Pop Art
Age 7-14
A traditional Pop Art project that works well and gets great results. Save yourself loads of time and get it here!
Jungle Project
Age 7-14
Improve your student's painting techniques by learning depth of field, size and proportion. This can be adapted for collage
Music Kandinsky
Age 7-14
Many art rooms use this type of project where students study Kandinsky and listen to music to create abstract art.
Drawing Lessons
Here are some free drawing lessons for you to download.
Drawing from memory should help to build basic memory retention which in turn develops learning ability. Object in a Bag and Doodle Bugs are aimed at developing imagination whilst Mark Making focusses on expressing emotions and creative intelligence.
Memory Drawing
This staple drawing exercise was used by Henry Moore during the war to draw in the air raid shelters. It is an essential!
Free to Download
Drawing Letters
The relationship between writing and drawing is powerful and often children who are struggling to draw a shape will find confidence
Doodle Bugs
This is a lovely starter exercise enjoyed by pupils of all ages (even adults!)
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Mark Making
I love this lesson. It's so simple, fun and expressive. Students love it too. I've seen it done Early Years through to GCSE
Blind Hand Drawing
All ages
Another lovely starter activity that focusses students' attention on something very familiar to them.
Describing Drawing
All ages
This exercise can be a great literacy activity and is excellent fun too! I use this a lot in class.
Rubber Drawing
All ages
Alovely drawing activity that deals in drawing in reverse. You take away marks instead of adding them. Great fun for all.
Blind Contour Drawing
All ages
Making 'blinds' to go over the drawing hand is a great way of teaching young artists to study hard.​
Charcoal
In this project students will learn about tones when working with charcoal
Wax Resist
Uses oil pastels and powdered ink. The technique in this lesson are great for sketchbooks.
Indian Ink
Shows you the basics of using Indian Ink. It can be done by students at any level, & usually goes down well
Texture
I put this together as an introduction to using cut out shapes and textures. Good sketchbook activity.
Abstract Drawing
This lesson challenges students to invent a secret language then draw in an abstract way to communicate words and phrases in their own unique style.
Design Drawing
Six high-quality design exercises for you to use as homework activities or cover lessons. Design a car, a spaceship, fashion outfit, logo, graffiti and robot.​
Homework Drawing
Fine Motor Skills
Free Exercises
Art History Resources
This 'Studying Art' Ebook which has lots of literacy activities for teaching art history and the formal elements. Download
Art Timeline
Teach the whole history of art in one lesson with a fun game. This is a superb lesson and it should be compulsory in year 7 in my opinion! Great fun, great learning.
Body Language
Make stuffy old paintings fun again by interpreting them through body language. Great fun.
What are you thinking?
Use freeze frame drama techniques to unravel the meanings behind the masterpieces.
Art Investigations worksheets. The download contains the literacy vocabulary sheets too. Download
Ideas & Thinking Skills
Pointless
The original ideas game turned into a classroom activity to develop original thinking. Use this as a starter before an ideas session to show pupils how to come up with great ideas for art. Edit it for your own use.
The Paper Clip Game
This isn't my idea, but a translation of a psychometric test developed in the 1960's. It's a very challenging task, but one that really uncovers who has a good imagination. Can be used as a good group starter.
Where do ideas come from?
This presentation looks at a wide range of ways that we can develop an idea and more importantly, where ideas come from. You can cherry-pick individual slides to highlight a point you want to make about idea development. Add your own ideas to it!
Symbolism
Obviously symbolism has been around as long as mankind has, and there are many good examples out there, but this attempts to make symbolism a succinct lesson that informs idea creation. This can be adapted and developed further into more complex study.
Idea Mining
One of my favourite resources! A PDF handout that can be printed as a poster too. It focusses thinking of ideas into different strands from surface, immediate ideas into deep thinking. This principle of making your students think of different strategies for ideas, tasks and projects is a really important one.
As an NSEAD registered art consultant, I offer a friendly, professional art consultancy service to schools, from early years right through to Secondary GCSE. I've worked with infant schools to improve art assessment, delivered primary school CPD on skills and progression, worked with Subject Leaders to raise attainment and done whole school, secondary art department audits including formal lesson observations and department reviews. My over-arching strategy is to support the professional development of hard working professionals with positive and constructive advice for improvement.
My consultancy bookings are now being handled by Iain Simper of the Learning Partnership. For enquiries email Iain here
Training Courses
Please follow the link to see my latest CPD teacher training courses. If you can't see any that suits your needs, why don't you arrange for a bespoke in-school service?