I listened to your feedback and this year's version is spiral-bound. I also increased the size of the numbers for those of us that have a hard time focusing on a calendar far away!
Each calendar is $10.00 plus $2.00 shipping. I am excited to get it out to you. To order, click the PayPal link below.
I finished this piece this morning and I just felt so good after completing it.
I have had the wood piece for this for a couple of years now and have been working on and off on it. I was never really sure what the vision was going to be for this piece. I loved the colors that evoked nature and the forest but nothing spoke to me as the main subject or how I was going to pull it off.
I came across an idea somewhere to use colored netting in mixed media pieces. I have used cheesecloth before but never netting. I went and bought a few colors and found that it was fun to drape and work with.
I have been wanting to complete some titmice paintings for awhile now and these two birds just fit the whole feel of the piece. They were created on mixed media paper and I used Prismacolor pencils to complete them.
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.
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.
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.
We did a 2 week project in both my elementary and teen classes. I was really pleased in how it turned out and I think the students enjoyed doing this project as well. We used a product that I just learned about called Paperclay.
It's available at Michael's, folks!(Bring your 40% off coupon!)
Probably the hardest part of the project is going out and finding suitable leaves. This is definitely a early fall project here in Virginia because you don't want to use dried leaves. I went out each morning we were doing this to get fresh leaves for the kids to use.
The kids rolled out the Paperclay and pressed the clay onto the BACKS of the leaves. I had to explain to them that it wasn't going to look as nice if we used the fronts because we needed the veins to be protruding on the leaves. It brought up a great discussion with the little kids on what leaves were the best to use out of the bag I brought. Hydrangea? Good leave to use. Maple? Not so good but a challenge never-less.
Another challenge was getting the little kids to understand that they needed to make holes in their clay leaves BEFORE the leaves had dried. I had a couple of kids disappointed when they tried to make holes at the end of the project when they decided they wanted string to hang them.
I used take-out boxes from Dollar Tree for them to place their leaf sculptures in. This made it easy for me to transport home and bring back to class the next week.
The following week had us use tube watercolor paints to paint our leaves. I find that most children do not have experience with tube watercolor paints. They think watercolors are basically the pan watercolors in the 6 dishes that get yucky after you use them for awhile. I explained to the kids that it is my mission in life to BAN those watercolor boxes from kids' to use! I think it turns them off from wanting to use watercolors.
I had the kids try to experiment by using different colors between dried layers of color. I used my samples to show them how wonderful purple looks shaded on top of green.
The final step is what I think makes this project look really good. I let the kids chose a Pearl EX pigment powder which I mixed in acrylic medium to wash over their leaves.
It gave the leaves a beautiful iridescent finish that really made them look wonderful.
I would love to know what you think of our project. I think the kids really enjoyed this one!
