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.

Still Life

My Tuesday afternoon Painting and Drawing class has student's aged 5 and older. This means that the style and skill of the artists in that class varies all along the spectrum of art skills for children. 

I should preface this post with an apology for not getting a photograph of the still life set up I had for this class. The time between set up and beginning of class is a bit of a crunch and Time got away from me. I set up boxes of varying height covered in draped fabric, Two glass jars with cut flowers, a pair of beautifully embroidered and beaded purple shoes and an assortment of fossils, minerals and crystals. I am really kicking myself for not thinking to document it until after getting home last night, it looked fabulous. 

To start with, we talked about lights and shadow and how they form shapes on the objects that we draw. We looked at examples of still life drawings and discussed how using light and shadow to create form inside a drawing also creates space within the drawing adding dimension. We also talked about looking at our subject and our drawing at the same time as we draw so that our eyes and our hands work together. 

Each student, dependant on time drew with charcoal on white paper focusing on shadows. They then drew with white chalk on black paper focusing on highlights and then finished on coloured paper using both the chalk and charcoal incorporating both highlights and shadows.

As you can see from the drawings I chose to display from the lesson, each artist's style is completely different; as is the way that they chose to look at and draw the subject. The older of the artists in the class focused on more detail, really looking at the still life and how the light and shadows worked within the composition. Some artists chose to interpret the still life into their own style of drawing and the younger artists were still able to capture the idea of what was in front of them with their emerging skill set. 

I chose my favourites from the finished drawings to display.