Spring Session 2011- Week Eight

Swimming the Sea Watercolors and Foil Fish

Since May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month we thought we would give a nod to that culture by doing a project that dealt with the ocean, fish, and watercolors. This is a great project to do for the texture alone. It creates beautiful and to some extent random textures on your watercolor painting. Once you paint your picture and it is still wet sprinkle some salt on it and the result is magical and amazing. You just need to let it dry first and then wipe away all of the salt to reveal the beauty it has left behind. We used this technique only on the ocean/water part of the painting to imitate waves and those great white-caps that you see in water and the ocean. We then had them do the sky whatever color they wanted, and however they viewed the sky to be. Some did sunsets, some did blue skies, and some created wonderful patterns for the sky. We then had the children cut out their water/waves and glue them onto their sky. The next part of the project was to create the fish out of foil. We did a rubbing technique for create fish scales on the foil. We used old netting from fruit and candy and taped it onto some cardboard then placed a piece of foil over it. The children then rubbed with the backs of their finger nails to emboss the foil with the "scale" pattern for the fish. We used sharpies to draw over fish over the scales and it create a pretty convincing fish. In one class we had a little extra time this week, so we played some bingo in the last few minutes. A great way to pass some time and keep the kids focused.

Spring Session 2011 Week Two

Learning about ATC cards & Felt character pins

Nowadays we have all sorts of "baseball cards". When I was young I remember collecting Charlie's Angels cards, Star Wars cards, and Wacky Packages stickers. The great thing that artists now are creating are ATC cards (Artist Trading Cards). These cards are created by using typically mixed media. This week we talked to the children about what mixed media are, and how they are incorporated into ATC cards. ATC cards were basically created by an artist from Switzerland named Stirneman. In 1996 he wanted to create a catalogue for work he was doing with some other artists. Due to the high cost of printing what he called hockey cards, he decided to create them himself to a tune of 1,200. After he made all of them in 1997 he put them on exhibit, and when it was open to the public he encouraged those who came to create their own. So, ATC cards are the same dimension as baseball cards so you can fit them into typical baseball card sleeves for protection. ATC cards also are only traded or exchanged not sold. Though nowadays people do sell them though they are considered ACEO (Art cards, editions, and originals) cards.





















With the remainder of our time we had the kids make felt character pins. We created a few templates for the kids, but encouraged them also to create their own if they wanted to. These we super fun to make and putting googly eyes on them made them extra cute/funny.

Winter Session week one

Design Your Own Calendars & Kandinsky inspired artwork

For our first meeting of the new year and new winter class we made calendars and took a look at some of Wassily Kandinsky artwork. Kandinsky is one of the founders of abstract art, and music and art were inner-related. The idea of abstract art was a new idea to some children so we talked about what made an artwork abstract versus realistic. We introduced children to Kandinsky through his famous artwork called "Farbstudie Quadrate" and "Several Circles" that deals with rhythm, color and geometric shapes.

We used these paintings particularly the first one to recreate there own version by folding their paper canvas into half and thirds to create the individual cells or squares that would house the circles. The children then traced over the folds with crayon and drew nesting circles inside each square. They were then asked to paint with watercolors inside each circle and to not have the same color touching anywhere to help create a balance in their painting. The crayon helps create a barrier for the watercolor paint called "resist". After they finished the class directed exercise they were welcome to continue to paint other watercolor paintings using the same technique or experiment on their own.

The next half of the class we collaged pictures onto the different months. We discussed with the kids what sort of imagery might go with each month from national holidays to seasons. We offered trays of many different images that were month specific or seasonal that they could use or they could free form images as well. The month of January was saved for their Kandinsky inspired painting, which was a nice cover for their 2011 calendars. To finish up the calendar we gave the students a silver star sticker to place on their birthday.

This weeks session the children were able to learn about a historical art figure, learn some new words (such as abstract, geometric, resist (in the art sense), realism/realistic, expressionism, and Wassily Kandinsky), explore with watercolors, thinking about matching season and holidays with months of the year, and have fun in the process.

Thanksgiving 2010 Session

Our Thanksgiving class was packed full of different kinds of projects. This session we combined watercolors of a cornucopia still life, decoupage "giving thanks" jars, a cranberry crumb treat, stuffed triangle turkeys, and some fun games. Below are photos from our adventure during our half day special Thanksgiving class.