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.

Parent's Night Out

Winter Night Portraits

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.

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.