A Leaf Can Be

Today was my first class of the fall term at Artspace.  Artsparks is a parent participation class that combines music and movement with visual arts. Today we used a wet on wet technique to create trees with our hands, water and droppers of brown paint, sponges to lay down grass and sky and tissue on clear adhesive sheets to give our trees some fall foliage.

My sample piece for the lesson is to the left. My students did each step except adding a yellow sun and their art was so well done. I know what toddlers can do when it comes to making art; in case you want to know it's make art that professional artists work long and hard to replicate.

Students sprayed their arms and hands to make them very very wet. They then took droppers filled with brown tempera and dropped the paint into the wet areas of their paper. This created their tree trunk and branches.

Using sponges my students applied blue, white and purple paint to make a sky around their tree and yellow and green paints to lay down some grass beneath their tree. once the paint was applied we set the paintings aside to dry while we made the foliage for our trees.

Students placed leaf shaped tissue onto a lear adhesive sheet. The backing of the shelf liner that we used to collage our foliage onto is saved for use in a future lesson. All the instructor's at Artspace feel that reusing, repurposing and recycling is super important. If we can save something for another day it gets put into the back room. Once the smaller leaf shapes were placed down we used glue to layer larger tissue shapes onto the adhesive sheets. We then took the sheets and placed them collage side (and also adhesive side) down onto the branches of our hand shaped trees.

As a finishing touch red apples were added by stamping red paint onto the trees, on the ground and wherever my little artists wanted to.
I know I shouldn't be surprised by how amazing their creations are but I always am. I should also mention that I have very high expectations for my young artist friends. After all I am always striving to make art just like they do.

With this age group I'm more interested in engaging my students with the materials than I am with how much like my sample piece their project looks like. In fact because this is a caregiver participation class I find that I am often helping to teach the caregivers how to let their charges take the lead. Sometimes that can be more of a challenge than the art itself. At the end of the lesson what we really want is for our young artists to have had fun, gotten messy and to be really excited by what they made. As a first lesson for a lot of my students today it was a pretty good success for everyone.