Workshops I taught at Brushwood this summer.

I went to Brushwood Folkloric center  during the week of Sankofa this summer and was lucky enough to be allowed to teach some workshops. 

The first workshop I taught was on making beaded tribal hair clips like the ones I sell in my tribal trends etsy shop. My students did a beautiful job.

The second workshop was Drawing Creativly For Adults. This was an open ended workshop on using prompts, games and activities to inspire drawings.

One of the activities was a crumpled paper drawing. Students crumple paper the rub with a crayon or art stick on its side. Then you draw what you see in the creases and folds of the paper.

One of the other activities we did was the combined monster flip books.

Making a Non-Denominational Holiday Card

 I had to think of something that the kids could put on the front of a holiday card that would be sent to someone in which they would not know what their faith of religious sect is. So In asking for feedback I was told to use a candle. I agreed, a candle I thought was perfect and fairly easy to draw as well. After all candles convey light during the dark time of year, they provide heat and light and people are rarely offended by them.

The after school students an I are participating in the Holiday Mail for Heroes project which send mail to soldiers who are away from their families for the holidays.

I have made a link above to the projects main page if you would like to get involved.
below are the guidelines.

Card Guidelines:

Every card received will be screened for hazardous materials and then reviewed by Red Cross volunteers working around the country.

Please observe the following guidelines to ensure a quick reviewing process:

• Ensure that all cards are signed.
• Use generic salutations such as “Dear Service Member.” Cards addressed to specific individuals can not be delivered through this program.
• Only cards are being accepted. Do not send or include letters.
• Do not include email or home addresses on the cards: the program is not meant to foster pen pal relationships.
• Do not include inserts of any kind, including photos: these items will be removed during the reviewing process.
• Please refrain from choosing cards with glitter or using loose glitter as it can aggravate health issues of ill and injured warriors.
• If you are mailing a large quantity of cards, please bundle them and place them in large mailing envelopes or flat rate postal shipping boxes. Each card does not need its own envelope, as envelopes will be removed from all cards before distribution.

All holiday greetings should be addressed and sent to:

Holiday Mail for Heroes
P.O. Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456

The deadline for having cards to the P.O. Box is December 6th.
Holiday cards received after this date cannot be guaranteed delivery.

 

So  I have included the tutorial that I made the help kids draw a lit candle.

Pen and ink leaf drawings

I'm using my day off today to prep a lesson for the charter school I will be teaching at this Friday. Students will be using India Ink and a quill (feather) to draw with the ink. I use a disposable container to put the ink, since it stains. I also put down newsprint on my work surface. Students will start with pen and ink techniques making a value strip that practices the techniques going to dark.

Then using pressed natural leaves students will draw a contour outline of the leaf and use the pen and ink techniques to draw the leaf. 

Mini sketch book

This is a folded 8 x 10 inch piece of paper I folded it into 6 equal sections then drew items in the room one item in each box. I used pencil and colored pencils.rated
This is a great warm up or drill for high school or young adult students. Since little time is spent on any one item it has a fair rate of successful and possible unsuccessful drawings. It's a low frustration project so no one feels majorly defeated or frustrated with it.

Craft paper book

This was made from the leftover packaging paper from a box of speedy cut. I am drawing on each piece and will bind them into a book when I am done.

Happy birthday Dr. Suess

Hundreds of school children celebrated the "birthday" of Dr. Suess today and Read Across America week.So I thought why not bring the fun to art class too? After all the art of Suess was just as important as the text. So in honor of these events we designed and made drawings of Birthday cakes for Dr. Suess.

After a day of drawing those cakes I thought today I would try my hand at making some Dr. Suess birthday cupcakes of my own.
I  used chocolate cake mix, white frosting  I mixed with some blue food coloring for fish cup cakes.
 I also mixed the white frosting with some green food coloring for the "Green Eggs and Ham" cupcakes.

I got red Swedish fish and sandwiched them with white frosting for cat hats and red shoelace licorice for cat whiskers.  I used some left over gel icing for all other details.

Winter scenes at night

This is a drawing project I did with my after school program students.  I gave them black construction paper and white colored pencils. I showed them how to draw the snow hill,a pine tree and a snowman what they did with that was up to them.  We added some color with crayons for snowman details and color and the trees.

The drawing with a hole in it

I was at my local library looking for books for the children's classes I was teaching and I came across "The Book with a Hole In It."  by Herve Tullet. Just by looking at the spine alone  I was intrigued. This book is full on scenarios that all revolve around the hole in the book. On each double spread image there is a question for the reader as to what they want to but in the hole. You can throw balls of paper through a "basketball hoop" or make your face "whats for dinner." I not only really enjoyed reading this book to my young 3-5 year old students and letting them interact with it. I also enjoyed sharing it with older students and having them created their own drawing with a hole in it. We folded large poster sized white drawing paper in half then using scissors I had older students,7-9 cut a hole in the paper then draw a scene around it when they were done kids put their faces in the hole. One girl made a dog with the hole in the dog's face with grass and a yard around it another made the hole be the top of a lollipop and the rest of the paper was a lollipop stand selling the candy.

Here I am with an example I modeled after my dog.

Projects we did for Ground hog's day

 so forthe after school program..  We do a lot of holiday themes projects. I came up with this ground hog casting its shadow drawing...We used white copy paper, pencils and colored pencils...

I drew out the steps for the kids to follow then let them work on their own.

The other project-- commonly used amoungst elementary teachers via copy sheet- the popping ground hog puppet. Use a paper cup and a popsicle stick. Glue your paper ground hog to the stick then pierce it through the cup. Kids can now let the ground hog pop out of the cup. We added some extra's  We cut green construction paper and fringe cut the ends  then added shading and textural lines on on the  paper. tthen wrapped it and glue sticked in onto the cup. This part was a bit of the challenge for my young prek kids because the cup is slanted and the paper natrually wants to wrap straight so i had to assist with the wrapping step a bit. Kids loved  their finsihed product!

Food Pop Art

                                             
Okay, so must of us have seen the brightly colored silkscreen  faces by artist Andy Warhol. Many, many art teachers have had students do a variation on Andy's work by drawing their own faces multiple times and changing the colors...
Food is the inspiration for a lot of my art. so we did Pop Art Food.
Here is the images of my steps poster.

One of the students wanted a cat instead of food I told her fine so could do that. She said so really did not have a favorite food.

The hardest part of the assignment for the kids seemed to be that they had to reference the color wheel for the complimentary color combination. It was also a challenge to change the color of an object from what it should be. For example making an orange not orange.

In the past I had done the assignment with middle school students using their favorite cartoon character instead of food. We used tempera paint instead of markers of colored pencil. I preferred the pencils/ markers  to the paint. This worked best for quick dry time,easy storage and overall convenience.

some of my work

This is an oil painting on canvas and is part of a series I have been working on since summer 2008. All the canvases are different sizes and are following suits of cards and major Arcana cards from Tarot.
This is from another smaller series called "Out to Eat" They are small drawing simply of what was on the table when I went out to eat. Several are ink and are smaller then a postcard.

To see more of my work go to myartprofile.com

Some very sucessful summer lessons

I have been busying my self with summer art Camp plans. I taught a week of art lesson and projects related around art museums and careers at the art museum. All the staff at the art gallery I work at more wonderful. They were all more then willing and very eager to work with the children. To answer their questions and tell them about the work they do.

The students got behind the scenes tours of shows as they were being curated. They got to talk to facilities crews and members of the education department.

At the end of the week all the students art works were hung in a small gallery space and parents and families were invited to come see. We created a scavenger hunt for children to complete with their families. They were to find images pictured within the artworks.

Projects included the Peanut Butter Car challenge. Student were simply asked to draw a car that runs on peanut butter. Follow up questions were: Think about the challenges a car like this would have? What effect would it have on local wildlife? Where would the car be filled? What if the car leaks?

We talked a lot about framing and why certain frames are chosen for certain art works. We discussed frames being a work of art and how they need to draw the eye into the art work.
We created frames with tongue depressors and texture paint. We used palette knifes, toothpicks and butter knifes to create textures on the frames.
Students assembled frames first then created small op art inspired pieces to put inside them. We created multiple works then choose our favorite to put inside the frame. Then we added the colored paint that would best work with our artwork and added a repeating pattern to the work.













We created Mona Lisa drawings and looked at several examples of how artists have altered the work and created their own pieces with it. I have done this lesson before with elementary, 5th grade and 7th grade junior high students and I have always enjoyed what students come up with. I also bring in a giant fleece panel of the Mona Lisa and kids attach felt shapes to it.



















Alexa's "Many Mona's" drawing

The next assignment was to create a drawing of two different animals combined.


Optional extra assignments were two pencil drawing. Which uses two pencils held together to draw with.

Sign language drawings

When I lived in Arkansas and taught Jr. High I had a friend that was a sign language interpreter. I had also had several experiences with deaf culture at R.I. T. when I attended there. However I never really learned sign language the way I wish I would have.

These drawing simply use letters from a sign language alphabet and you pose your hand it each letter to create a three letter (appropriate) word or your initials.

I have seen several teachers use this drawing projects including my favorite art teacher Max Robertson. It is him that I blame for my wanting to become on art teacher. I was pleasantly surprised to see he taught the lesson in the similar fashion that I had.

Students will first practice drawing there hands. The should look for lines folds, creases, knuckles nails all details and learn how to use outline and contour shapes as well as using scale of one part of the hand in relation to another.
Drawing by John 2005

After a few sketches of the hand they then choose there there letters from the sign language alphabet and drew their hands posed in those three letters to create a word or their initials.

My drawing- done as example for Mr. Robertson's class 2009



The final step was to outline them in sharpie marker.

Drawing by Whitney 2005

Hurray for small sucesses!

So I have been tutoring this really cool 5th grade student. He has wanted for years now to be nominated his school art teachers "Student of the month". He drew all the time on his own and his grandmother had been trying to find him a private art tutor for awhile. I have been showing him pen and ink techniques, using watercolor, using pastels, talked to him a lot about shading things, perspective of objects and how objects change in size and color when in the background. We have also drawn real life objects and focused on their shading.

He went to his art teacher and showed him the drawings we had been working on together and he was nominated student of the month. He was very proud of himself and they put up his drawings on a display board in school. His mother showed me pictures of him with his teachers in front of it.