And The Schedule Is Still Full

I think that by the time I'm able to get caught up enough to post regularly it will be Winter Term end and Spring Break Camp. 

I apologise for the lack of posts while I try to get acclimated to the full schedule. I'll try to at least catch up with some finished art from the classes I've been teaching over the last few weeks. Below you can see a few. I've branched out into low relief and sculptural elements. 

A Wee Bit Delayed

Texture Turtle Art

January always seems to get ahead of me. While I'm able to keep up with the high priority, absolutely must get done things; the still important but not especially time sensitive things always seem to back up. Blog posting for instance.

Now I do have perfectly reasonable justifications for the tardiness of posting about last weeks lessons not least of which is the addition of three more lessons a week than  was teaching last term. The extra lessons while planned for are taking extra time. In addition I am also in the frantic planning stages of a birthday party set to take place at the end of the month.

So I'm playing catch-up which means that I'll be posting twice in the same day to get back on track. I could just include everything in one post but that's a lot of art for one post. Up top You can see the Texture Rubbing Turtle paintings from last Monday and Tuesday.

Below you can look at the Sky Colour Paintings and drawings created on Thursday. I especially love the drawn self portraits my young artists created to attach onto their paintings.

My special teaching assistant's piece 

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.

lines

our last Artsparks lesson focussed on monotone and complimentary colours,  lines and stamping. We used bingo daubers, matching oil pastels and complimentary watercolours with black paint stamped and rolled over top.

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.

Jam Packed with Jellyfish

Sometimes When I'm scheduled to do a birthday party the guest of honour has very specific requests for the theme of the lesson I must plan; How to Train your Dragon, Lego Friends, Ponies... Other times I get specific but very open requests for a theme. themes that direct me a certain place but allow me a lot of freedom to decide the focus.

My latest birthday falls in to the latter. When asked about the theme she would like the birthday girl just said she wanted something under the sea but not sea stars. A few years ago I devoted a week long summer camp to under the sea themes art lessons so inspiration was not difficult to find. Sometimes to get an idea all I need to do is look in the supply room at Artspace.  Mixed Media Creation parties at Artspace rely heavily on recycled and re-purposed materials for the lessons. The supply room is a treasure chest of saved materials from empty yogurt cups and magazine pages to piles and piles of caps and bottle lids.

I decided to use egg cartons and clear plastic water bottle lids to make a jellyfish garden under the sea. the results were... well I'll just let you look for yourself.

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.

Owls and Fire Flies

This week we focused on monochromatic art in Art Exploration. Using oil pastel and watercolours we brushed orange onto yellow orange oil pastel and turquoise over top of blue oil pastel to create a yarn wall for a small owl to make a new scarf. We read Little Owl's New Scarf to get inspiration.

Little Owl in the wool shop. Oil Pastel, tempera paint
and pre-cut construction paper owl shapes 

Arts Enrichment and Art Sparks have been painting using sponge rollers, pom poms and pencil grips to create an early evening sky with glowing fire flies inspired by The Brightest Star.

Tempera paint on mixed media paper with sequins

I have a Pro-D camp on Friday which is now consuming all my planning time. I want to do something different and have had no luck with my test projects. I have visions of my idea hanging in the windows at Artspace for the holidays.... I do have a backup in case inspiration fails but fingers crossed.

I also have a birthday party to prep for this weekend. A mixed media under the sea themed project is simmering in my head.....

Busy busy busy

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.

The Way Way Upside to Teaching to the Toddler and Preschool Set

Every child is an artist. 

The problem is how to 

remain an artist once we 

grow up. Pablo Picasso

And how you do that is by making a point to make art with toddler and preschool aged children as often as possible. In the two plus years that I've been teaching art to children and the two or so weeks I've  been posting about teaching art to children here; I've mentioned a smattering of times that my expectations for the final artworks for each of my art lessons is always exceeded by my little artists. 

It's how they approach making art that really does it. And it's really not that they all approach art making in the same way because boy do they not do that. What I mean is that they walk into the studio excited about making art. Even my highly anxious young artists dive into making art. Sure there are days that are better than others, there are days that the materials we use and the subject matter doesn't really do it but even on those days there is some form of visual expression that they can get behind. Even if it's just the first few minutes of class with markers and sketchbook the act of making art makes them happy.

In this week's Art exploration lesson I was treated to some serious observational skills from one of my young artists. An exploration of the materials and techniques used in the class that pushed outside the really good moment, pulled it back and pushed it further combined with a unique application that gave the creator's a super finished art work.

The lesson incorporates one of my favourite paint application techniques: gift card paint scraping and rolling. We also stamped into the painting with contrasting white paint. I pre-cut cat shapes and chalk pastel was used to add detail to the cat before it was glued down to the painting.

A moon, A Tree, an Owl and Masks

One big post about this week's classes. That's how I'm doing things this week, cramming lots into one little space....

on Tuesday I had my Arts Enrichment students practice using scissors and using both a brush and an eraser topper to apply paint creating a full moon backdrop for an owl collage. I read Moon Child to get us started. It's a lovely book that follows three nocturnal creatures as they relate to the moon in the sky. The music and movement portion of our class has us curling up into a ball just like one of the illustrations in the story and it was so much fun seeing my young friends make that connection.

I've mentioned using scissors is challenge for preschool and toddler artists. I took a trick I found online to help give my young artists the proper holding position for cutting with scissors. I had  everyone hold up their scissor hands and give the thumbs up sign. My co-teacher and I then went around the studio and drew a smiling happy face on their thumb nail. When they had the happy face smiling at them they knew that the scissors were being held correctly, cutting wen t much better with our happy thumbs.

I had a cancelation for an appointment on Tuesday in the afternoon which gave me time to make more low poly paper masks for my painting and drawing class Tuesday afternoon. I actually got some photographs of the still life set up and the final paintings were beyond what I thought I'd get.

My students each approached the still life differently. Some carefully observed how each of the low poly shapes aligned together creating a drawing and then painting that was proportional, others used the masks as a jump point and painted more symbolically and other's took the shapes within each low poly mask and used them to create a pattern within the drawing which they then painted.

I had each student look at the masks and name the part of the mask that was the whitest or lightest area, where the darkest shadows were and then to make note of the areas that were midtone. I then had them sketch from the still life, They then painted the highlight area white, the dark areas black and the midtone areas grey.

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.