And The Schedule Is Still Full

I think that by the time I'm able to get caught up enough to post regularly it will be Winter Term end and Spring Break Camp. 

I apologise for the lack of posts while I try to get acclimated to the full schedule. I'll try to at least catch up with some finished art from the classes I've been teaching over the last few weeks. Below you can see a few. I've branched out into low relief and sculptural elements. 

January Gets Away From Me

In the posting department anyway.

It seems that the added number of classes I'm teaching, combined with the planning and executing of a birthday party for my youngest, daily routines and the addition of volunteering duties with my eldest daughter's school are keeping me much too busy for posting on the a regular basis.

So on the one hand I'm gloriously busy and on the other I'm too swamped to share what I'm doing.

I've added the video I created for the art career fair at my daughter's school last week. I presented as an art educator and wanted to share some examples of my art lessons and the art done by my students. (just one of the activities that has filled my time)

On a personal art making note I've also slipped in time to do some personal work (granted the project was conceived as an option to read to my classes in preparation of creating some jelly fish art but I'm doing it in my own time and may not finish it in time to present to this terms classes) I've started a handmade book using a grouping of haiku poems as the inspiration. I'm using the book as an opportunity to explore new mediums and techniques . So far I'm pretty happy with what's come out of it. It's a pretty organic process so far and I'm having fun with it.

With my teaching load so full I decided that making art for personal reasons was a high priority and have been using time I might have used to post about lessons taught during the week to do some of my own art. I've added a few images below of some work in progress.

Detail of Jellyfish book page

Detail of pen drawings of jellyfish on stencilled gessoed paper

As January comes to a close (and Mercury leaves retrograde) I have high hopes that I will be able to focus more of my time on posting here as well as keeping up with all the other activities piled on my plate. 

How is your year beginning shaping up? Are you as jam packed and scrambling as I am or are you weathering the new year transition more smoothly?

Winter Collages

For Art Exploration on Saturday I had my students tear paper and glue it down to paper that had diluted blue, black and purple paint rolled onto it. We added daubs of white paint and finished off with oil pastel drawings of animals on clear adhesive shelf liner 

My demo piece for the lesson

 I especially love the drawings of each animal. This class contains mostly ages three and four yeatrs old and their drawings are always so much fun to see

A Wee Bit Delayed

Texture Turtle Art

January always seems to get ahead of me. While I'm able to keep up with the high priority, absolutely must get done things; the still important but not especially time sensitive things always seem to back up. Blog posting for instance.

Now I do have perfectly reasonable justifications for the tardiness of posting about last weeks lessons not least of which is the addition of three more lessons a week than  was teaching last term. The extra lessons while planned for are taking extra time. In addition I am also in the frantic planning stages of a birthday party set to take place at the end of the month.

So I'm playing catch-up which means that I'll be posting twice in the same day to get back on track. I could just include everything in one post but that's a lot of art for one post. Up top You can see the Texture Rubbing Turtle paintings from last Monday and Tuesday.

Below you can look at the Sky Colour Paintings and drawings created on Thursday. I especially love the drawn self portraits my young artists created to attach onto their paintings.

My special teaching assistant's piece 

Faces and Colour

Keeping with the oil resist theme of the beginning of this term I had my Painting and Drawing class use oil pastels to draw abstracted faces that were broken up into different planes and then patterned with colours and repeating lines, dots and other shapes. I then had them use watercolour paint to fill their drawing with blocks of colour. We used the art of Sandra Silberzweig as inspiration for our projects and talked about the elements of Sandra's portraits before we got started. There were some very good observations made about symmetry and asymmetry, use of colour and  pattern and shapes.

In this class I have a lot of returning students and the age and skill levels are in the same range as last term. From the five year olds to the 9 year olds there is a rainbow of different painting styles and techniques. It's a great class and I'm looking forward to the term with them.

Now I'm getting geared up for Painting and Drawing class #2 on Saturday. I haven't decided if I'll do the same lesson or do What I've planned for Arts Enrichment and teach from opposite ends of the lesson plan. I'll share with you when I post about it.

New Year New Lesson Plans

Welcome to 2016! I hope your holidays were lovely however you chose to spend them.  Mine were a bit of a whirlwind combined with a good dose of decompression. I spent one really lovely day alone at Artspace making more ink from dried out markers and cutting down and organizing the painted paper stack. We are ready for a term full of collages and intermittent ink washes.

School is back in session and so is Winter Term at Artspace.

This term I've planned ArtSparks and Arts Enrichment lessons that will focus more on fine motor skills in tandem with art exploration. Because I've got two classes of Arts Enrichment (and a possible second class for ArtSparks if registration picks up).

I've planned a single lesson plan for the classes but instead of repeating the same lesson twice each week I'm going to try teaching from both ends of my lesson plan. What this means is that the first lesson of the term for my Tuesday class will be the last lesson of the term for my Thursday class. There will be a lesson that overlaps in the middle of the term but 99% of the lessons for each week will not be repeaters. If there wasn't a student that is registered for both days I wouldn't bother but I have one of those and I want that student to be engaged with the lesson for both classes.

As an added challenge one of my Enrichment students is accompanying a sibling to an artsparks lesson which means that I'll be working towards making sure that they aren't doubling up on the same lesson each week too.

The first lesson of the term was an exploration in tracing, texture rubbings and painting. Here are a few examples.

How are your lesson plans shaping up?

Camp Day 3

I didn't take any photos from day two's project. It was a blur of activity and while the finished art was fantastic I had family plans that required a quick clean up and a fast run home to gather all the things that needed to come with us on the bus to get to my sister's place.

Day two was inspired by the late and truly great Rex Ray and his collage work. I wish i'd had the time to document the finished art as there were some amazing renditions of Ray's collages and some very unique collages as well.

Day Three was an experiment in abstract painting using art dice and limitations.

I went around the table three times and had each student roll a colour die to build their painting palette. If they rolled the same colour they had already rolled they rolled again. I had the odd coincidence of the people at each end of the table rolling the exact same colours in the exact same order another odd coincidence with the second step too. Once we had a colour palette created I then had each student roll a shape die to pick the primary shape their painting would feature. In my first group I had an even assortment of circles, ovals, rectangles, squares and triangles with not a single star shape rolled in the group of 10. The second group made up for that with seven of the eleven in the group rolling the star shape.

Once they had their colours and shape I had them use charcoal to draw their main shape 3-5 times on the paper. Then they were invited to break up their painting space using lines and other shapes of their choice. They then filled a painting palette up with the colours they rolled and white. They were invited to use the colours straight, to blend with white and to mix with the other colours in the palette but they were not allowed to share paint or add other colours different from their rolled choices. when they were finished painting the entire surface I would give them black and a fine brush to outline the different shapes. This was the class that I had a totally finished not that into painting "when is my Mom coming?" student. I managed to get a second painting out of him and then he spent the rest of the class reading a book to himself. The rest of the group kept on painting to a very colourful result.