Fall 2010 Week Two Wayne Thiebaud and Flipbooks

This week we took a look at the artist Wayne Thiebaud. He is a contemporary artist that had a love for food. Though he did traditional landscapes and portraiture he was fascinated with food particularly sweet treats. My kind of artist! He worked in pastels and oil paints mostly. Using his interest in painting and sweet treats we had the children draw their own ice cream cone. We had the children use oil pastels for this project due to its inherent nature of texture and blending capabilities. Oil pastels are a cross between oil paints, and crayons, though they blend so much better. I personally really enjoy using oil pastels because they draw like butter. You also don't have to press as hard to get beautiful intense color. When you blend and draw over other colors they mesh and move around on the page to create more natural color, shadows, and/or highlights. I think the ice cream treats the kids drew look amazing. Since, many weren't use to coloring over color it took a little coaxing to get them to understand how oil pastels can work that way. I love the way they turned out.

Our second project for the day were flipbooks. Growing up I remember being amazed by this concept that is the basis for movies and animation today. Flipping through these books and watching the pictures move and do funny things. We tried to break it down by using rubber stamps, and having one stationary object and one object that moves on each page. A simple enough concept, but challenging to do. The kids had a fun time stamping, and some stamps even moved way off the the page onto shirts and hands. The most difficult part was keeping the stationary object stationary on each page. The moving object was a much easier task for the children. Even though the stationary object may not have been perfect the small movements page to page make it interesting. I have to apologize to parents for any books that may have came apart at home. I had to replace new staples in the stapler we used and I think that they were an inferior staple. Who would have thought staples came in good, better, and best grades. If the book loses some pages you can re-attach the book back together with a home stapler if needed.