And Just Like That

We are at the end of October.

In the spirit of All Hallow's I had Artsparks, Arts Enrichment and Art Exploration classes create Itsy Bitsy Spider Mobiles in the style of Rebecca Emberly. My Painting and Drawing students used charcoal and very thinned tempera to create Fox and Crow paintings and for All Hallow's We're revisiting The Fox and the Crow and adding a dash of bats for Art Exploration.

Painting and Drawing used The Fox and the Crow by Manasi Subramaniam as inspiration to paint these works of art. All of them are frameworthy.

I'll be revisiting this book today with my Art Exploration classes in character as the fox.

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.

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? 

Mini Exhibition: Joy Walker Inspired Tape Drawings

A few doors down from Artspace there's a coffee house that displays some of the art that is made by the students at Artspace.  The photo above shows the randomly selected tape drawings that the coffee house has on display now. The  art that wasn't chosen for the coffee house are on display at Artspace. You can see them in the photograph below.

The lesson was based on Joy Walker's  tape drawings. We talked about lines and their use in creating art, the different types of lines in Walker's art and how to make our own tape drawings.

As always I allowed a great degree of freedom for my students to explore the media assigned to the day's art lesson and their own ideas.

Happily I was not disappointed. The students explored line length, thickness and creating shapes and space. They also made great use of colour in their projects and in some cases adding
even more pattern with their paint.

All the art created yesterday went above and beyond my expectations. I have never been let down in my expectations for what my students can create. This lesson was no exception. It was a great beginning for the fall term and a great lesson.

Topping this weeks lesson is going to be quite a feat

Line and Pattern with Tape

Tomorrow I'lll be teaching the first Painting and Drawing lesson of the year. I've been building my lesson plans on a foundation of the elements of art.

During my research for this term I came across a textile artist from Canada named Joy Walker. Part of her practice includes creating line drawings with tape on paper and other surfaces. I loved how these drawings were great examples of creating space, and pattern with lines alone. This is a time lapse example of what I've got planned for tomorrows lesson. I will post a more detailed entry for the lesson once it's done.