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.

Winding Down and Getting Wound Back Up

December always creeps up on me and this year more so. Between birthday parties, Parents Nights Out, volunteering for my eldest's school's PAC, School performances and collaborating on the window display at Artspace with one of my fellow instructors time has gotten away from me.

My after school painting and drawing class has come to an end. We finished off the term with an artist trading card making session and a small talk about art abandonment. I took some time to go through all the artwork that had not been taken home and package it up in folders with a small note to each students thanking them for their time with me. One of the parents of a younger class member took the time yesterday to let me know how excited her child was with all the art she brought home and the impact of my thank you note. I'm feeling pretty good about the term and already have some new ideas for Winter term. The penultimate lesson was a full on painting exploration of planets in space. 

We are gearing down with the rest of the terms classes. by next Saturday the term will be done. My main focus at the moment is to get a parent participation lesson ready for the end of term and the plans I made at the beginning of the term don't excite me as much as I'd like, so I'm exploring, looking and thinking so I can build an exciting lesson.

Patterns and Klimt

This term when I sat down to create my painting and Drawing lesson plan I thought a lot about what art elements I wanted to focus on. I wanted to pick an element and then combine each lesson with another element because no art element is an island or something similarly deep and arty...

Anyway, getting back to my point I chose a running art elemental theme to run through the terms lessons and the theme I landed on was Pattern. Pattern is the repetition of shape, form and texture to keep the eye moving around. Pattern creates balance, space, and helps to organise composition. 

With this in mind we took a look at Gustav Klimt this week. We took some time to look at some of Klimt's most popular paintings as well as some of his lesser works. We discussed the patterns that Klimt used most in the art that we were looking at and then we jumped tight into drawing a portrait. I don't often do guided drawings but sometimes a guided drawing with portraits and body proportions helps to get the idea of some of the basics cemented or at the very least gets the students thinking about what they are looking at. 

As you can see from these finished examples I had a pretty wide range of portrait styles with my young artists, With students aged 5 to 11 there is bound to be varying degrees of technique. I had my students dress their portrait with patterns and then create a background with even more repeating shapes using oil pastel. The final step in the lesson was to add a water colour wash over top of the oil pastel portraits and patterns. 

It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. While most people have taken the less stress route when it comes to the Harvest feast I decided to take a different road this time around. I'll be making a lovely squash soup to take to a friends dinner party. I've committed to ham dinner with two sides and dessert on Sunday and another turkey dinner with stuffings and a few other sides on Monday. I'm going to be honest. I've got some lovely friends and family bringing dishes and important sides on both days but I will be focused on culinary creations for the next few days. I'd hoped to have a book review post about the two books I used in my lesson plans last week but those will have to wait until the thanksgiving food coma has passed or a lull in the cooking happens and or procrastination rears it's weird little head. If you are a South of the 49th you're big turkey day is coming... If you're a fellow north of the 49th parallel dweller Happy Thanksgiving. If you can go out and hit the early voting sometime in the next few days. I voted this afternoon and I couldn't express how awesome it was.

Dragons and Sunflowers for Swords

Last year the Art Sparks and Arts Enrichment classes did a project based on Perfect Square; the book I read with my Art Exploration Students on Saturday.

I make an effort to keep lesson topics fresh and to revisit techniques instead of subjects so instead of continuing with the same book for today and tomorrow's lesson I introduced The Sunflower Sword by Mark Sperring and illustrated by  Miriam Latimer. I built a Dragon Themed birthday party around this book last year which was a big hit. Today I focused on the spread in the book that had the dragon flying over top of a giant field of blooming sunflowers.

In my garden I have a lovely patch of sunflowers this year. The bright yellow petals surrounding the smaller blossoms set out in a Fibonacci spiral are beautiful in and of themselves. Adding a dragon to the composition is a full on winner with my own little artists as well as the artists in my classes.

We started with an application of yellow and orange paint with sponges and also foam shaped stamps. I then instructed my artists to add the brown centres of the flowers with a round brush. The opportunity to bled the brown paint provided with the still wet oranges and yellows was taken by a handful of artists in the lesson and the brush work they used added energy  and interest to their compositions. A few other artists were more interested in precise application of the brown and others were more interested in applying the yellow and orange and only a small amount or no brown was added at all. Our next step was to use scissors and painted paper scraps to cut out the shapes to build our own dragon. The dragon was glued onto our under painting and a final addition of a googly eye ( or three, or five or two) was added.

Regardless of what steps were taken or left out in the process each of my young artist friends learned a little bit about texture, pattern and shapes today. It is always really fascinating to see the ideas of children this age emerge onto paper.

Once the finished works are dry I will post some examples.

Ohika Collages and Assemblage

Today was a Professional Development day in the school district and instead of regular Friday lessons, Artspace ran full and half day camps. As I mentioned in a post this morning I taught campers a mixed media art exploration class.

We used the art of Magaly Ohika as a jumping off point for the day's project. Students used chalk pastels. painted papers, fabric scraps and yarn to create Ohika-esque figures. A handful of my campers took the opportunity to create purely from their own imaginations. 

Campers are split into groups based on age; With my older campers we turned the collage project into assemblage with the addition of circuit boards to the composition. I loved seeing how and where each camper placed the board into their art. 

My younger group focused on the collage aspect of the project. The project was fill of colour, pattern and texture. 

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?