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.

Camp

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week i taught the Winter Break Camp at Artspace. Camp lessons are an hour and fifteen minutes and planning for them involves more steps and detail than a regular hour long class. There is nothing I dread more than hearing thirty minutes into a class than "Teacher, I'm finished"

Of course I hear the dulcet sounds of that phrase nearly every lesson I teach  the younger groups (aged 3-6) so the dread is in the anticipation of it as much as in the utterance. I've gotten pretty good at redirecting back to the art but there's a good chance that the I'm done will be so complete for whatever reason (it's the last day of camp and it's two days until christmas and I'm just done already!) that I have to allow for it and hope that it's not contagious which it can be and then am I ever in for a bout of mild chaos.

This camp was no exception and I was prepared with an extra project on day one, the instruction to make another and as many as you can get to on day two and a fresh sheet with all the colours on day three.

So camp rundown:

Day 1:
multi step painting and collage of a winter forest sunrise to celebrate the Solstice

End of Term Catch Up

Blur. The last tow weeks are all a blur and a whir and something else that rhymes.

Fall term ended with altered portraits in Art Exploration. I'd love to share the final art but I don't want to violate the privacy of my students and their families. I can say that every one had lots of fun drawing and painting on top of each other's pictures.

From end of term I leapt right into a Parents Night Out class. I had my group create baby monsters from mixed media materials. With a group with ages 5 to 10 I'm pretty pleased with the outcomes.

Winter Is Coming

End of fall term is always busy. Holiday planning, shopping and celebrating takes up loads of extra time. The last week has seen my time parcelled out amongst three extra projects; small celebrations, card writing and winding up last classes and projects. 

The project below involved cutting, drawing and paper marbling using shaving foam and liquid watercolours.