Unexpected Day Off

Well.... one son at home with a sty so that means my art classes were cancelled for the day. Too bad I had all the prep done for the Chinese Dragon puppet. Can't even post it yet as I need the sample unpainted until after the construction phase is done. Oh well hopefully by Wednesday.

So what to do..what to do...


Worked on my daily painting practice.



Still working on those water reflections.






















Started designing some Valentine's Day ideas. I usually have to get these done early as we take our annual winter vacation over Valentine's.

Haven't embellished them yet but if you are interested here is the template.





Otherwise just planning out projects for the next few weeks. Came across a great paper mache Penguin project I am going to do with Grade 1. Hope to post our results.

later

gail

Penguin Printmaking

Well it seems penguins are all the rage at school. Both kindergarten and Grade 1 are doing penguin units....with all the snow we have had I guess its appropriate.

Here is a Penguin Printmaking project. I have seen this on a few other blogs but when I first started doing this my reference was the Usborne "Christmas Activities" book. Usborne has some good art books out there but keep in mind that they tend to repeat projects in other books in their series. I got most of mine thru the kids Scholastic program at school.

Materials Required:

- blue, black, white, and orange paint, we used liquid tempera

- paper

- dollar store sponge

- potatoes

I taped 11x17 white sketch paper to our art boards. I like to take the time to tape for 3 main reasons:

- it holds the sheet down for the kids so it doesn't move while they are painting

- it decreases the amount of rippling in the final product...just keep it taped until fully dry

- it provides a nice mat effect for the final piece

Paint your page completely with the blue paint. We used large brushes. Lee Valley has a brush set that is inexpensive and works great for as a school set.

I took the dollar store sponge and cut some long rectangular pieces.

Dollar store sponges are another terrific painting supply. You can wash them out and use over and over again. I buy packages of 6 for $1.00.

Sponge on the ice and snow with the sponge. I explained to the kids that the penguins needed somewhere to stand. They really used their imagination at this stage. We had igloos, hills, ski jumps. snow slides, and lots of floating icebergs.

Now it's time for the potato prints. We used med sized potatoes. I wanted small and large sized penguins. You need two sizes for each penguin. One for the full body and one for the belly. Following the book's advice I cut little handles into the potato, don't skip that step as it proved to be terrific for those little hands. Cut your potatoes lengthwise and be careful to get a level cut. This will make the printing easier. You can also cut the potato width wise to get that smaller belly sized piece.

I used a foam plate. I know its not the most environmental friendly but it works well. The book suggested paper towel but I feared that would fall apart to easily.

Pour some black paint onto the plate, swirl your potato to make sure bottom is well coated.

Figure out placement and then press down for print. I let the kids do a practice on a paper towel if they wanted.

You need to stress that it is a print and advise them not to slide the potato around. Gentle pressure on the potato before lifting off.

Reload the potato with paint for each print.

When your penguin bodies are all in place you need to paint on your arms or wings.

We used paintbrushes. In hindsight I should of grabbed the smallest brushes we had, as it was they were using size 2 which are a quarter of an inch...we still ended up with some pretty large arms or wings.

I tried to get them to make only one pass of the paintbrush to make their arms and this seemed to work better.

Now let your painting dry especially the penguin bodies. For these tutorial pictures I continued on but you can see it gets a bit messy.

Take your belly sized potato and load with white paint. Make your penguin bellies.

I cut that Dollar store sponge into a triangle shape. Using orange paint make the feet of the penguin.

For the beak I made a smaller triangle shaped sponge.

For the eyes I used some daubers I had as well as a dowel. You can use the ends of paintbrushes as well as the ends of pens or markers for this. I wanted the eyes to come out clean so that is why we didn't use a paint brush. With kindergarten we would have ended up with some very large eyes otherwise as well as some frustrated kids.

Stamp on the larger white circle and then the smaller black center.

You can see in this picture that it got a little messy....your result will be better if you allow the black penguin body to dry fully first.

That's it. I have a large snowflake punch that the kids will use to punch out some white snowflakes and then will glue on with the glue stick. You can make some small paper snowflakes on your own or you could paint some on or you could glue on some snowflake sequins.

Another good option is to have the kids draw some on with white pencil crayon or gel pens. I wouldn't advise chalk as they won't be able to get a fine enough line for the snowflake.

Next week I'll tackle this same project with Grade 1 as well as start dragon puppets with grade 3 for Chinese New Year. I'll post the dragon tutorial next week. I'm planning on a paper mache, glue batik mix.

see you next time

gail

Calendar Portrait Studies

As promised here is another way to use those old calendars. They make great teaching aids for portrait studies. Often a student can get intimidated by trying to do a portrait, by giving them half the picture they learn placement by drawing/painting the mirror image. As they gain confidence you can go to a quarter page if you want. My kids love to do these studies. My youngest(6) does his in crayon and pencil crayon while my oldest(11) attempts them in watercolor.

Find a good image. This is from a local wildlife calendar the city sends out every year.

Fold and cut in half. Often the image is not centered on the page so try to find the center of the subject and make your fold there.

Glue on some paper with a glue stick. I did mine in watercolor as I was trying to get my daily practice in so I stuck mine on 140lb wc paper.

For my kids I usually use heavy sketch paper.

Do your sketch trying to get a mirror image. Hold on to the half you cut away for reference if needed. It's useful for determining shadow and highlight.

Add color by painting, using wc pencils, pastels, or even crayon.

Here is another example.

Give it a try. If you don't have an old calendar you can find lots of portraits on Google images.

We woke up to ice fog this morning. The trees were beautiful but we didn't get our blue sky today. Calgary is usually the sunniest place in Canada, (even though it's still cold).

see you next time

gail

How to Create Art with Old Calendars

Well I'm back....had a good break and I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Back to business though, I usually don't do resolutions but I'm going to try hard to get that daily painting practice in as well as continue to create some great art tutorials for you.

Sorry I was unable to get the templates to work for the last post however THEY ARE WORKING NOW!! I know Christmas is past but the Snowman and Penguin are still applicable.

I love January for one main reason...old calendars, even new ones, I always tend to get a gazillion in the mail. Instead of putting them straight into the recycling bin take a second look. They are a treasure trove for the budding artist.

Great for reference photos and for teaching some basic art principles.

I have been drawing and painting for over 30 years and I still go back to these exercises again and again. Art like anything that you want to do well requires practice. This usually takes my students by surprise...they often think you are born with it........ While you may be artistically inclined you need to work hard and practice. That is what makes you a better artist. I just find art so much fun it doesn't feel like work.

Here is a picture stretching technique. It works well for all grades and abilities as you can easily increase the challenge if need be.

Lets get started.



Find a picture you like in an old calendar. Trim off the top to get rid of the little hole for hanging.

Take some white paper, I'm using 11x 17. You want your paper to be longer than your picture so you can stretch it.

Measure the height of the picture and cut your white paper so it is the same height.

Turn over your calendar photo and cut the picture into vertical strips. You can use the month grid to help you with this. Try to keep the strips in order or else you will be assembling a puzzle as well.

Lay out your strips on the white paper to get a feel for how you are going to stretch it. It helps if you anchor each end of the paper with a strip, put one in the center and then arrange the remaining strips from there.

When you have it the way you like glue them down with a glue stick.

Using a pencil, sketch in the gaps.












Now you can choose what medium you want to use to add color:

pastels

watercolor pencils

tempura

pencil crayons






I'm using watercolor pencils for this one.

The ones shown here are my expensive ones but I found some great sets for the kids at the toy store of all places. They came in packs of 24 and were only $12.00 each. That might still seem expensive but you can get a lot of painting out of these babies. The kids also have greater control with fine detail work.

Just remember some guidelines. You want to add water in small amounts and keep cleaning your brush as you go. You also want to let some areas and colors dry a bit before painting others otherwise your painting just mixes all together.












If you want to make this more challenging take out some of the strips.

For this one I am only using 4 instead of 7.

I decided to use tempura for this one.

It's amazing what you can come up with. This is student grade tempura on white cartridge paper using 2 brushes, a 3/4" flat and a small round both of which belonged to the kids.

A good color study technique for the more advanced artist

Give it a try and hold on to those old calendars. I have a few more projects to show you next time.

see you soon

gail

How to make Holiday Paper Chains

TEMPLATES ARE NOW WORKING....YAY!!!!! There is something about making paperchains or paper dolls....once you start it is hard to stop. So if your kids are driving you crazy with all that excitement before the Big Day and you have too many things to do to help them with a big project...sit them down and get them to start making paperchain decorations. They can be as simple or as elaborate as you want. After some basic instruction they will be off...and soon the house will be covered in Holiday Paper Cheer!! Materials Required: paper scissors pencil templates SNOWMAN GINGERBREAD ANGEL PENGUIN tape colored paper markers glue stick any other embellishments that are lying around ie. doilies, sequins, stickers Cut some paper in half the long way. Now you can use computer paper, construction paper, newspaper, wrapping paper, etc. The possibilities are endless but you want it to be about 4-5 inches wide. If you need to tape these together. The longer the strip the longer your chain. Do a quick measurement to figure out where your first fold should be. Rather than trying to divide the whole long strip into segments...I make a mark for the first one. I want it to be 4 and 3/4's of an inch long and then I just start folding. At the end if there is a piece that is too short for another fold I just cut it off. You can always join two chains together. You also don't want it too long when you are decorating it as it gets in the way. Accordion fold your paper trying to get all the pages to be the same size. If you have an extra piece at the end just cut it off. Using the templates or making your own design trace it on the paper. If making your own design just remember they need to be connected either by hands and arms or looped together on a drawn in rope on either side. Cut out your design ensuring that the sections on the side where they will be joined are not touched by the scissors. Open up your chain and start decorating. You can use markers or colored paper and add some pizazz to your chain. The possibilities are endless and addictive. Once your kids get the hang of it they will be everywhere. Good Luck and Merry Christmas!! I don't think I'll get another post in by the 25th so I hope everyone has a great holiday with their family and friends and don't forget to make a craft or create some art. I will be at our cabin between Christmas and New Year's but I plan to do a post or two from there. God Bless gail