Saturday Class: More Of The Same But Different

By looking at my posting history one would think that all I do is post new entries here.  This last week you wouldn't be far off. Starting a new blog is a slow process and I always find the beginning to be a little lonely with only one or two posts in the first week or so. I find writing posts to be a time consuming process.

Getting the ideas out, uploading images and deciding what to share take time, and then there's the proofreading process which I will admit I am a little out of practise on. I've been trying to go through each post before it goes live and again after I've had some time away to catch any mistakes in grammar or phraseology. Feel free to grammar police me if you see anything I miss.

Today is the last class of the week for me. So far registration has been a little slow for my parent participation Art Exploration class and today's Painting and Drawing Class has been cancelled for this term due to lack of registration. My preschool class, which has always been my fullest class is a go so I'm headed in to make more art with kids again today.

Usually I have a separate lesson plan decided for my Saturday classes but the leaf projects from earlier this week were so amazing that I'm going to keep that theme going. I don't know exactly what I'll be doing today, that should come on my walk to work while I collect leaves from the sidewalk and grass in the neighbourhood. Sometimes no matter how good a lesson I have planned is; I just feel the need to change things up. I know it's not the most ideal thing to share on a blog about building and sharing lesson plans but I think it's important to share the spontaneous side of my lesson building with you too. In fairness; the spontaneity usually fits within the same parameters. I'll expand later when I've shared today's end results.

I did mentioned the book I used with the lessons on Monday and Tuesday but I thought I'd share the cover and link here to Amazon in case you were interested. A Leaf Can Be by Laura Purdie Salas is beautifully illustrated with dreamy images and the text paints a word picture while being simple and poetic that using the book as a starting point for making art is almost a no brainer. The number of ideas I've gotten for lessons with this book, based on both the illustrations and on the words themselves is worth owning this book instead of hoping that it's available at the library when I need it.

A Leaf Can Be Follow up and Pro D Camp Plans

I've got a Professional Development camp today. I'll be teaching a total of 23 artists today, using the artist Magaly Ohika as our inspiration. 

I love her work. I've been cyber stalking her distinctive art for years. Today I'll be sharing some of it with the campers and we'll be putting our own spin on it with some recycled electronic circuit boards. My plan is to shoot grouping of the artist's creations to share here. 

As promised here are the finished art pieces from my Arts Enrichment group. With a combination of oil pastel rubbings and painted applied to the leaves and stamped onto the paper I couldn't have been more pleased with the finished work. Since this age group has a focus on exploring and making art I was pleased to hear one of my favourite questions during the process:

Teacher, How do I make brown?

What followed was an experimentation of how many different shades of brown could be made using only yellow, green, red and orange. As you can see from the posted art here each of my students has a unique style to their art making already. The first picture in this set has a wonderful example of positive and negative space where the artist used the leaves to mask the paper while painting. Some of my other artists were more precise with their paint applications and rubbings. 

What ways do you use the autumn leaves in your art practice? 

A Leaf Can Be Second Time 'Round

While yesterday's A leaf Can Be lesson was a great success I decided to go in a different direction. Tuesday I teach Art's Enrichment; a preschool Music, Movement and Art class for preschool aged children.

Today I collected some leaves on my way into class. As you can see in the time lapse video we painted our leaves in fall colours and stamped the painted leaves onto black and blue construction paper. We also made use of oil pastels to make some leaf rubbings.

The finished art was beautiful and varied, just like the artist's who made them. I don't run my art lessons very strictly; I like to allow my little artists the freedom to express themselves and explore the media. If I stuck to a strict lesson plan opportunities for young artists to explore different techniques would be lost. One of my students today created leaf shapes in negative space by applying the paint to the leaves on top of his art paper. The result was phenomenal and one that would not have happened if the artist was stopped and directed to follow my directions to the letter. As long as my students are respecting the space, their fellow artists and the materials I am more than happy to let them walk to the beat of their own drum.

I'll update this post later with finished art from the students.

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. 

Fall Term Begins

I am an artist. I teach art to children aged 2 up to tweens (and older if the opportunity arises).  I have a bachelors degree in photography and I create things in one form or another most days. As of tomorrow I'm starting my third year of teaching at Artspace Children's Art Centre a unique arts centre that offers inspiring visual and performing arts programs for children aged 2 to 13 in the lower mainland of British Columbia.

This year I'm doubling my teaching schedule. In addition to painting and drawing for school aged children and art exploration classes for toddlers and preschoolers I'll be teaching the visual arts section for the two combination visual arts, music and movement classes for toddlers and preschoolers. I'll be adapting some of my previous and current lessons for these classes.

I used to blog frequently up until a few years ago when the demands of a new baby with a child beginning school took away a lot of my blogging time.

Then came the teaching gig at Artspace and instead of blogging I was teaching myself how to create a good lesson plan with enough flexibility to add or remove steps and still have a creative and fun class for the little people in my classes. I would love to say that I have got that all down pat, that I can plan in my sleep and that walking into the art studio that will soon fill with small faces with and without their faces is a breeze; but I'm kind of glad that it isn't the case. I say this because the nervousness and anxiety is a big part of the process. I use that uncomfortableness to prod me to really research for inspiration and then create some really great lessons. Like the ones pictured here.

Like a lot of art educators I peruse the art lesson plans pinned on Pinterest to get inspired. For the first few terms (and I'll be honest here) even now I like to glean ideas for lessons from the Internet. In fact I plan my lesson plans on Pinterest boards so that I have a visual reminder of what I have planned for each lesson. More often than not I end up changing my lessons at the last minute because I've seen something that has excited me. Over the course of the last three years I've created some pretty awesome lesson plans. The best ones have all had a specific artist as a jumping off point instead of another instructor's lesson. Again as an example, the images I've posted here were lessons I created after looking at the drawings of UK artist Antony Gormley. The anatomy themed project perhaps more directly so than the map but both projects make use of the same process and both lessons elicited a very satisfying chorus of ohhhhhs  during the lesson.

These classes use a wet on wet painting method that allows the paint to flow only where the paper has been previously wet with a brush. In the anatomy painting the figure was lightly drawn then painted over with water. I had my students drop black alcohol ink into the wet areas; the ink flowed only where the paper was wet. The same technique was used with the maps, the water areas on the globe were filled with a good layer of water and blue ink was dropped into those ares. a second wash of water was added for the brown outer areas.

The reason I'm posting about this technique here today is that my first lesson tomorrow is going to make use of it. The two lessons shown above were done with grade 5 and 6 students and were quite involved lessons. Tomorrow's lesson is a thirty minute class with toddlers and their parents and caregivers. I'll be reading A Leaf Can Be by Laura Salas and illustrated by Violeta Dabja.

With preschool and toddler's I always start my lesson off with a picture book. Sometimes the lesson will be based on the illustrations and sometimes the book is used to get my little artists thinking about their subject for the day. While Violeta Dabj'a illustrations are simply beautiful; tomorrow's lesson uses her beautiful work as a glancing jumping point. I'll post a more thorough description of tomorrow's lesson which will include a variation of the wet into wet technique as well as sponge painting and tissue paper collage; all combined to create some tree art with fall foliage.

The plan is to post the lessons I've taught to my students here with the book I'm using for each class and the artist or art teacher who inspired the lesson. I've got a goal to have all my lessons created by myself rather than borrowed from another lesson I've seen. There are some amazing art teachers out there who are happy to share their lesson plan ideas. I want to be one of them.