"Wild Dolphin", Mixed Media on gallery wrap canvas, 5"x5"-FOR SALE

I finished this piece up last week and I am really happy how it turned out. I have been wanting to paint a dolphin for long time. This canvas had been laying around my studio for awhile and I thought it was perfect to experiment with Liquitex Glass Beads. I LOVE the texture and how it came out. I used Pouring Medium to coat the front.

Piece is on gallery wrap canvas and is ready to hang.

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Thank you for looking!

Week 4-Elementary Art-Lascaux Caves

One of my favorite art subjects to teach kids is about the Lascaux Caves.  If you have never heard of them, check out this video:

I didn't have internet access available to me during class today so I could not show them the above video as I had planned.  Instead I told them the story of how 4 boys and a dog found the cave in 1940 in France.  I showed them photos of the cave drawings from this book:

We talked about all the different images that were drawn and how they might have told stories of hunts in prehistoric times.  I also told them the sad reality that Lascaux is now closed to the public due to bacteria that was brought in by visitors that was contributing to the decay of the paintings.

We then worked on are own cave drawings.  I used brown wrapping paper cut into approx. 16"x20" pieces. We crumbled up the pieces and then added a brown tempera wash over the paper.

While we waited for our paper to dry(a hair dryer helps in this process!), I read a fiction book to them called "The First Drawing" by Mordicai Gerstein.

While doing my research for this project, I came across a lot of different titles that looked great for kids.  I was limited by what my library had to offer.

We made some stencils of different animals that the kids were interested in putting on their drawings.  We had looked at all of the colors used in the original cave paintings which brought a great discussion on earth pigments and the use of these particular colors due to their lasting properties.  For the drawing, we used pastels and I was lucky to find this set of earth tone pastels on Amazon.

The kids had fun trying to decide what they were going to draw.  I thought that they might be frustrated with the limited palette but I didn't hear one kid mention it at all  They really embraced the whole concept of doing accurate cave drawings.

Here are some photos of the kids working on their pieces:

Here are some the kids' final pieces.  By the way, I sprayed fixative on each one so it wouldn't end of being a mess on the car ride home!

Thanks for stopping by!  Next week we will be learning about symmetry in art in the elementary class.

Sunday Art Inspiration

For the last few years, I have been a little obsessed over haystacks.  It is to the point that I saw a painting one of my artist friends did of haystacks and I was actually jealous that she had found some haystacks to paint!

When people think of haystack paintings they automatically think of what Monet did.

Who doesn't love a good haystack painting?

However, all haystack photos are not created equally.  I can drive by some random haystacks in the mountains but if the day and time are not right it doesn't make such an interesting photo.

Carlton Farms in Williamsburg has plenty of horses grazing around but just recently they added some haystacks.  In 10 years of living here, I don't remember seeing haystacks there but I'm lucky that they are so close.

Last night after I left my new studio(more information on that later!) I thought the sky looked beautiful so I drove over to see what the haystacks looked like.  I was able to get a few nice photographs.

I have no idea if I can paint anything from these but one has to admit that these are some beautiful sky photos.  What a beautiful night.

I am going to play around and crop some of these and study them for awhile.  I would like to add some color into them like Monet's haystacks.

Stay tuned!