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. 

Shaving Foam Puff Paint

In the past I've used homemade puff paint to make snowmen, and the earth. My fellow art teachers at Artspace have made polar bears, ice cream cones and cupcakes.

To make the paint you mix equal parts foam and glue. Some would say this is easy and on paper it is. However I've never quite gotten the measurements exact what with the expanding nature of the foam. I eyeball it and mix it as best as I can. At Artspace we've used liquid tempera and also gel food colouring to the mix to create marble colours and full on tints.

I just love how each of the snow men created have their own personality. 

which leads me to the discovery I made last year when I had my little explorers make earth in space one of my artists scraped away some of his puff paint from the circle we were painting into earth. The paper was beautifully marbled. with this in mind I created another shaving foam paint lesson for the next lesson that focused on making those marbled masterpieces. I'll be making use of the left over paint this morning for that very thing. I'll post with those soon.

Frosty

Usually around the end of November I start thinking about wintery art lesson themes. No exceptions this year on that. Last winter I found a recipe for making frost paint. It's a hit or miss project that has good results even without the frost succeeding.

I'm cooking up a lesson alternative this morning and when I come back later this afternoon I'll share the results.

after:

Jury is still out on the frost,most of the paintings that were nearly dry at the end of the day had a lovely granulated effect but now frost patterning. The really wet ones have possibilities.

Negative Space Take 2

My Preschool Art's Enrichment class also worked with the idea of negative space and Dots last week.

Here are their finished art.

Monoprinting with Younger Artists

I posted a time lapse the other day in anticipation of the start of a multi class lesson plan.

Here's another in anticipation of introducing or re-introducing as the case may be mono-printing to my preschool and toddler classes.

Circles: Background, Foreground and negative space in a Toddler lesson

Teaching foreground, background and negative space to the under 5 set is a tricky concept.

We used layering and window cuts in this lesson.

We started out with a piece of red construction paper with a taped together pre-cut circle. We drew on the paper with oil pastel and then added yellow paint with sponger and then set it aside to dry. We then brushed water all over our second sheet of white paper and brushed colour and spattered paint using toothbrushes.

Both sheets were left to dry and then I assembled the two pages together, Placing the cut out circle of red paper on top of the white painted paper and a sheet of purple construction paper onto the back of the red paper with the window cut. The display of finished art is giving the entry to Artspace a lovely warm glow that the overcast shorter days is really needing.

I did a variation of this project with my preschool Arts Enrichment Class. I will post about that once I've gotten them all put together.

Perfect Square

This time last week I was steeling myself for the possibility of only one class on Saturdays and I am pleased to now have two sessions of Art Exploration classes for two age groups Saturday mornings. Art Exploration as the name suggests an exploration of art materials and elements for toddlers and a caregiver and for children aged three to five. Last week we explored oil pastels and paint on paper with leaves. This week we're looking at things from the shape of a square

A few years ago I was in the library looking for a picture book that had a focus on circles for my very first art class at Artspace. While looking for a circle book I saw sitting on the shelf a book about a square. I of course picked up this book and brought it home all the while wishing that my lesson was about squares (because back then I was a little more rigid with my lesson plans; I was a new teacher and very far out of my comfort zone so keeping within my plan was all about coping). This Saturday class will be based on the illustrations in that book and that book is called Perfect Square by Michael Hall.

In the past I've taught this lesson in two parts. Students would paint a rainbow onto mixed media paper and then in a second class the paper is transformed with scissors, folding and cutting into a picture that has it's inspiration from one of the pages in the book. This time around, because we have an abundance of pre painted paper at Artspace we'll be creating our art from the stock of painted paper. Focus was on choosing papers that appeal to the artists, composing an image onto paper and practicing scissor and glue skills.

The purple pieces were done by my toddler artists. Each one of the artists was fully engaged in the process of the art today. During the lesson I was talking abut how focus in the  lesson is getting engagement from our artists and not looking for anything specific within a composition, I went on to say that often allowing the freedom to engage with the materials brings out some very amazing finished artworks. Today's lesson illustrated that point to a T. Each of the artists in the toddler class was allowed to compose their image with very little involvement from their caregiver. My favourite parts of the lesson was watching the thinking process in where things were placed on the page. In all cases the artists made very specific and engaged choices for their work and it shows.

The Blue backed art was done in the Preschool class. In this class we had the same focus and engagement. Each artist approached the project in very different ways. From the deconstruction of the backing paper into a new shape (which referenced our inspiration book) to the minimalist compositions and the compositions that used multiple layers and or broke out of the image frame. I was very pleased by the outcome of each class and love that I get to share the work here with you.

Friday Book Round Up

This week I referenced two books for my balloon painting lessons. 

I'm a very big fan of Peter H Reynolds' books for their art inspiration. His illustrations remind me strongly of Illustrator Quentin Blake of Dr Seuss Great Day for Up! fame. But it's not just nostalgia for one of my favourite books as a kid that I like. It's the stories that he tells in his books and how they promote being creative, thinking outside the box and being an artist. I have added three books from Mr Reynolds' bibliography to my own book collection. I've mentioned that I don't often buy books unless I really love them and these certainly fit that criteria. Rose's garden isn't in that bunch yet. I ran across this book while researching for this weeks lesson and as soon as I saw it was a Reynolds' put a hold on that baby. I was not disappointed. 

In addition to loving Reynolds Ehlert is another go to favourite author illustrator for both bedtime reading with my children and for art lesson inspiration. my kids often pick up a Lois Elhert (both illustrated and authored and illustrated) book from the library as one of their free choices. Her cut paper shapes and the bright colours lend themselves to preschool and toddler art lessons especially because the shapes she cuts are both engaging and simple. One of my favourite Elhert title is Hands: Growing up To Be An Artist which is an artwork in itself. 

If you're interested in either of these books click on the image of the book and find yourself at Biblio.com an independent book selling website or visit your local indie bookseller and buy your copy from a real living breathing person. Also feel free to visit Amazon.ca (or.com)to find the book you're looking for.By preference I try to buy from independent book sellers but I  also know that sometimes convenience and price are better if you have a tight budget.

More Flowers and Balloons

Just like last week I kept Monday and Tuesday lessons pretty similar. Since our Tuesday students are a little older and have a longer lesson than Monday, I added a few changes to extend the lesson. We started the lesson with a reading of the picture book Rose's Garden by Peter H Reynolds. I decided on a different book for this group because it was a little more involved than yesterdays while still keeping within the same theme.

My little artist's started their project by learning how to hold and cut with scissors; this is a skill we will revisit again and again with this age group. It's always a tricky lesson for me to teach and for the little ones to learn but it's very important for later when the same grip is used for holding a pencil. each child was given a piece of construction paper with a teapot shape pre-drawn on it. Following the instructions for holding and using their scissors each child cut out their own teapot. Every teapot is unique to the artist who cut it out. Some were given a little help by myself or my co-teacher, howeverthat number was considerably less than I anticipated. Given that the class size is quite big we did quite well with our cutting. We decorated our teapots with white glue and fine glitter and set them aside to dry.

We used balloons to create our flowers again filling our whole page with balloon impressions. Once our pages were covered in flowers we glued our teapot on top referencing the final illustration in Rose's Garden where the heroine's giant teapot sits as if floating on a sea of colourful flowers.

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?