A moon, A Tree, an Owl and Masks

One big post about this week's classes. That's how I'm doing things this week, cramming lots into one little space....

on Tuesday I had my Arts Enrichment students practice using scissors and using both a brush and an eraser topper to apply paint creating a full moon backdrop for an owl collage. I read Moon Child to get us started. It's a lovely book that follows three nocturnal creatures as they relate to the moon in the sky. The music and movement portion of our class has us curling up into a ball just like one of the illustrations in the story and it was so much fun seeing my young friends make that connection.

I've mentioned using scissors is challenge for preschool and toddler artists. I took a trick I found online to help give my young artists the proper holding position for cutting with scissors. I had  everyone hold up their scissor hands and give the thumbs up sign. My co-teacher and I then went around the studio and drew a smiling happy face on their thumb nail. When they had the happy face smiling at them they knew that the scissors were being held correctly, cutting wen t much better with our happy thumbs.

I had a cancelation for an appointment on Tuesday in the afternoon which gave me time to make more low poly paper masks for my painting and drawing class Tuesday afternoon. I actually got some photographs of the still life set up and the final paintings were beyond what I thought I'd get.

My students each approached the still life differently. Some carefully observed how each of the low poly shapes aligned together creating a drawing and then painting that was proportional, others used the masks as a jump point and painted more symbolically and other's took the shapes within each low poly mask and used them to create a pattern within the drawing which they then painted.

I had each student look at the masks and name the part of the mask that was the whitest or lightest area, where the darkest shadows were and then to make note of the areas that were midtone. I then had them sketch from the still life, They then painted the highlight area white, the dark areas black and the midtone areas grey.