Another Round of Art Classes

I have decided to do another 10 weeks of children's art classes this upcoming fall. They will be held on Fridays at 2:00 pm and possibly 3:00 pm.  If anyone is interested leave me a comment or send me an email and I'll get you the information for them.

Treasure Maps!

You can't study pirates for a school unit and NOT do pirate maps. When I took an e-course from Deep Space Sparkle this summer she had a lesson on making treasure maps. I could not pass this up on our unit. It was just too much fun.    She had great handouts that talked about the different items you'd find on an old map, how to make scrolls, and we just had a blast with it.  Shark infested waters, treasures, whales and serpents   We also came across a really cool pirate game that works with checkers. Where you have the Spanish Fleet trying to get their ships of gold safely back to Spain without loosing it all to the pirate ship. The kids loved it.

Of course even sometimes mom wants to have fun drawing and painting too and making a map was just too hard to pass up. I usually give it the name of "demonstrating" the lesson, but really it's just me wanting to relax and play too.

Incas, Conquistadors and Pirates!

Recently we did a unit for homeschool on the conquistadors, Aztecs, Incas, Myans and pirates. We read this great book about the Lost City, learned about Pizarro and Cortez, made some Spanish doubloons and finished off with some gold Inca masks.

We used gold foil to create our Inca masks and our Spanish doubloons. We learned about symmetry while drawing our masks, and then texture as we pushed the foil in and out to create the textures of the facial features and designs.

We added a bit of color with some colored permanent markers and additional decorations such as feathers and beads.

And yes... that mess you see on the table is what you see at our house on a regular basis during school time.

 I just love the unique way they turned out, especially the shininess of the gold foil!  The kids loved this project and ended up playing with their masks quite a bit afterwards.

Down by the Sea

This was the last project we finished for our summer class.  It seemed only fitting that it be a beach summer theme. This was a two day project for us. The first day we painted the background sky and sand. Then painted and textured our blue papers for our water. The second day was spent collaging boats and putting together our sea.  This is a great lesson for talking about depth and space. How objects look smaller the farther they are away, and how the boat that is going to be the farthest in the distance is going to be tiny compared to the boat that's closest to you.  Some of them got this concept easier than others or they made the different sized boats but forgot placement when they started gluing. It was also works wonderful for talking about overlapping with the waves and ocean to make the boats look in the water and to create a feeling of depth.  Sorry about my slightly blurry photos. My camera hasn't been working all that great lately.

I found the idea for this project at Fine Lines.

Colorful Chameleons

I've seen this lesson on deep space sparkle for a while and just fell in love with it.  But I'm a sucker for anything bright and colorful. I decided to do it with one of my private students and some of my kids. I thought they did a great job. Unfortunately I only have two pictures of the finished ones and my sample.  This lesson is great for talking about complimentary colors, brightness and contrast, how to draw animals, and pastel techniques.

Mid-evil Castles

I'm finally having a chance to get caught up on some of our art projects for this summer's class.  One of our summer art classes was creating some mid-evil castles. I don't know of any child that doesn't love the magical, fairy tale dream land.  They did a great job creating these, and it would have been nice to have a bit more time to put in backgrounds. I probably should have given one more class period to painting backgrounds.  Live and learn I guess.  Some of the things they learned about was: Architecture, pattern and texture. I still love how one lesson can vary so much from the Kindergartener up to the 5th grader.

I took the idea for this lesson from Deep Space Sparkle.

Starry Night and Day

I loved the results of a lesson from Deep Space Sparkle when I first saw it. I decided to try it with my kids and another little boy that came to our house for art time.  We talked about cool and warm colors, looked at the use of lines in Starry Night and then had them choose if they the sky or land to be warm colors or cool colors.  This was their finished results.  My girls really loved this project.

We had such a fun time that we decided to do it with my summer art class.  Although we gave it a twist this time around.  We talked about how to create depth in your art work by having a background, middle ground and foreground. I encouraged them to also try to use warm or cool colors.  I used Starry Night to help them identify where his background, middle ground and foreground were. I also encouraged them to use lines in their sky to create movement similar to Van Gogh's Starry Night.    Here were our finished results.  I loved how they turned out and with such a great variety between the differences in skill and subject matter. (Sorry the colors are slightly off - trying to photograph these were tad more difficult.)

Here's how we made them.

1. Take a 12x18 piece of black construction paper and cut it so you have a 9x12, a 6x12 and a 3x12 piece.
2. Have the students draw their sky on the large background paper first. Make sure the designs they want shown are in the upper third of the background.
2. Have them draw the middle ground - hills, city, mountains, water, trees, animals etc on the medium sized paper.  Cut out the top spaces so it has more dimension and negative shapes.
3. Draw the foreground on the smallest paper. That could be waves, beach, a hill, grass, etc.

4. Fold the background in half so it'll stand up.
5. Fold the edges back about 1/4 - 1/2 inch on the middle paper, to make a tab that will wrap around the back of the large paper to staple it.  Fold it in half.
6. Do the same thing you did in step 5 only fold the side tabs twice as large as the middle tabs so that it will pop out in front.  Line the papers up and staple the tabs to the background.

We were able to get it down in within the hour art class, but we were pushing it with 11 kids. If you have a larger class, you might want to do it in stages so they have more time to do a really good drawing.

When I Grow Up - Self Portraits

Recently I started teaching some art classes out of my home to children in grades K-6th. Previously I was an art teacher for K-2 grades in Las Vegas.  It was something that I had thought about doing right after I was married. We had visited Beau's relative and his daughters were showing us their artwork they had created in an art class they were signed up for. It sounded like such a great idea to do private lessons from your home.  At the time I didn't know where to even begin setting up something like that. Life started happening and it got set to the side. (I ended up substituting for a boys lock down school instead... hmm how did that happen?)  

Now 10 years later I've started homeschooling and have seen how much my kids love it when I say it's time for art. They have some of their mother's blood in them. :)  I've enjoyed finding lesson ideas on the internet to try out with them and have found some inspiring sites from some awesome art teachers.  

I decided it might be fun to teach a few art classes to other homeschoolers and friends.  It would give my kids some more interaction with other kids and summer seemed to be the perfect time to try it out. So we gave our first class a go.

Our first lesson was imaginary self portraits. They were to decide what they wanted to be when they grew up and do it as a self portrait.  I used a lesson from Deep Space Sparkle.  I love her site. She has so many great ideas and lesson plans available. My summer art class has kids in it ranging from Kindergarten to Fifth grade.  That can be challenging to find something that will fit the different skill levers but when you do it's fun to see the variation.

The little first grader above wanted to be an artist. I love her finished picture with lots and lots of windows because "artists need lots of light."  After she finished her entire picture she had to add paint splotches to her painting on the face, hands and shirt, because "Artists get really messy and get paint all over them."  It's been a lot of fun for me to get back into teaching something I love so much. I'm excited to show off the rest of our art through out the summer.