Paddy Art Class #2 Goldfish

We recently installed a lovely large fish tank in Pademelon, full of beautiful goldfish. The residents love to watch the flashes of gold as the fish swim in and out of the foliage and rock decorations.
(Pademelon is the secure dementia facility where my Mum is a resident.)

Since starting the art activities at Paddy, I've been steadily learning more about the residents - their capacity to stay on task, and to listen to, comprehend and follow instructions is severely limited. As the dementia progresses, these capabilities diminish further.

I am learning to modify my expectations, not of the residents artistic endeavours, but my own goals for each session.

When I work with children I would not dream of touching their work without their consent, and then only briefly to demonstrate a technique or to help them understand an elusive concept. When I am with the Paddy residents we often work on their piece together, even with me guiding their hand.

As an art teacher, I have quite strong views about 'colouring in' sheets. I rarely use templates, and then only when the goal of the lesson is quite separate from the basic drawing and our time is so limited that I have little choice. But if presented with a blank page, my elderly dementia sufferers are lost, even if I place a pencil in their hand. What is important from their sessions is not necessarily a piece of art work that is all their own work, but rather the social process of being there - enjoying the feel of the materials, marvelling at the lovely colour combinations, having a laugh, and feeling good about what they have accomplished.

For our goldfish pictures I made a colouring-sheet using Word and Clip Art. This gave my group a starting point. I gave them wax crayons to add colour (bright colours only!) Most had had enough after just a few moments, but 2 or 3 sat colouring for nearly a whole hour (June, whose picture is featured above, is one of these. She carefully selected the colours she wanted to use and sat colouring for the fish and leaves for ages!). I had planned for them to add patterns to the table cloth and perhaps a wallpaper pattern, but no-one was able to do more than colour the shapes they had on the paper. (They just do not have the fine motor skills and ability to apply pressure to get the colour strong enough.)

The real pleasure came from watching the wash of colour go on, and the transformation of their pictures with the crayon glowing in the blue wash field. There were lots of 'oohs' and 'aahs' then, so I counted this activity a great success!

Free-Form Pots

Lachlan F

Tova R 

For our pottery piece this term we made free-form pots.

We started with slabs of clay, which we decorated by pressing on leaves and string to create a surface pattern. We then prepared small balls of clay to create the feet, before moulding the slabs over our knees (a technique that has been around forever, and is always such fun!) We attached the feet to the base while the slabs where still draped over our knees. The resulting pots have a great oriental-style look.

After bisque firing we spray painted the pots with a base coat of indian red - a rich metallic red-brown colour that is the perfect base for the bright colours we dribbled by wiping our loaded brushes against the rim of the pot. I advised the kids to choose 2 colours - I love the mandarine orange and ocean blue combination  that Lachlan has selected in the example above. The dribbles run unpredictably, and seem to fit well with the free-form shape of our pots.


In the time we had at the end of the pot-painting session, we made these cute snake finger puppets :)
I photocopied the templates from Mr Printables - great for cutting skills practice and lots of fun for a half lesson fill-in!

Paddy Art Classes - #1 Butterflies

My lovely lovely Mum is a resident at Pademelon, a secure residence for people with dementia.

Mum is now non-verbal. She has lost nearly all her ability to care for herself, and also much of her interest in just about everything - she walks continuously and needs full assistance for every aspect of her personal care, from the time she wakes up to the moment she goes to bed.

Despite all this, she still seems to recognise us (judging by the look on her face when I walk through the door) and is still quick with a laugh. She loves to dance and gives kisses freely - she is a joy to be with, and she still is, as she always has been, my mum!

I've recently started doing art 'classes' with the residents at Paddy ....
For our first project I had no time at all for preparation, so I 'borrowed' it almost exactly from Kathy Barbro over at Art Projects for Kids. I saw the idea on her post Butterflies from Central Asia which featured a mural by one of Kathy's followers, using one of her butterfly designs.

We completed our butterflies as two 45cm square canvases.

I provided the residents with a palette of warm colours, a blank canvas (divided roughly into quarters with a red painted line, with an overlaid square in the middle) and a large black marker drawing of a butterfly. The residents then painted them.... bearing in mind that these are people with varying degrees of advanced dementia, I had many variations in degrees of participation - from the higher functioning ladies who sat for an hour meticulously painting the butterfly, to the people with lower functioning who painted a few brush strokes as they walked past, or contributed a brush-stroke with me guiding their hand. I also needed to give lots of encouragement and suggestions for "a bit of yellow here do you think?"

We didn't need to worry about staying in the lines, as they were going to be cut out and outlined heavily with black glue.

We repeated the process the following week with a cool palette.

There was great hilarity when we spattered the backgrounds with yellow paint!

When both were complete I cut out the butterflies and glued them onto the backgrounds with Mod Podge, outlined them with black glue, then sealed everything with another coat of Mod Podge.
(Next time I will try using Elmers Rubber Cement as the glue, as the butterflies have warped a little bit.)

They are so proud of their accomplishment on this project, and I am so proud of them. Some of the 'walkers' touch them as they go past (the black glue makes a raised line that feels good). Rose and June want them to be hanging in their rooms, but we have them in the lounge for everyone to enjoy :)

Soft Pastel Animals (in the style of Franz Marc)

'Kiwi' by Louise M

'Angry Goose' by Kane B

Franz Marc is probably my favourite artist, and I was absolutely thrilled to see examples of his work 'in the flesh' when we were in Madrid (as part of the temporary Gauguin exhibit at the Thyssen).

This week our creations are in the style of Franz Marc, featuring our favourite animals in a natural setting, and  using colour to express emotion. We've chosen to use soft pastel, for it's bright rich colour, and because we love getting our hands dirty!

After looking at various examples we drew our animals with black marker, then added colour with soft pastel. Although it doesn't show up well in these photos, we used at least two colours in each area, referring to our colour wheel to decide which colours would blend well together.

We ended up with a great variety of animals - from dinosaurs to horses, and a couple of dragons too! Everyone did a great job!!

Peacocks for Mother's Day

With Mother's Day just around the corner, we decided to create special Peacock pictures for our Mums.

After guided drawing, we used oil pastel on black paper, with free choice of colour and being sure to include lots of layering and blending.

Before adding colour we used a solid undercoat of white pastel on our peacock bodies and the 'eyes' in their tails to make the colour bright and bring those key elements of our designs forward.

Our peacocks are just fabulous - I know they'll be treasured by our Mums for many years to come!

This lesson was inspired by collections I found on Artsonia here and here, and this beautiful photograph found on Pinterest.

Abby (Yr 5)

Estelle (Yr 4)

Juliana (Yr 2)

Kaiden (Yr 4)

Lana (Yr 4)

Luka (Yr 3)

Ziva (Yr 1)

Love the Chameleon!

Sophie (Yr 3)

The Chameleon video clip was so popular last week, we've used it to inspire our art again this week.

This time when we watched the clip we were paying particular attention to the basic shapes of the animal, the patterns of his skin, and his large eyes that can independently look in different directions at the same time.

We drew our chameleons on watercolour paper, then went over all our lines with black permanent markers.

Then we had great fun experimenting with watercolours, focusing on wet-on-wet paint application and the spectacular textural effects that happen when you sprinkle salt on the wet paint. We love the unpredictable movement of the colours as they flow and blend together, and it's fascinating to watch the painting change as the salt continues to soak up colour in unexpected patterns.

A wonderful project, inspired by a number of others including this great lesson at Deep Space Sparkle. Due to time restrictions we don't have quite the same depth of layering and texture, but we are thrilled with the results!

Eli (Yr 1)

Mackenzie (Yr 1)

Millie (Yr 3)

Bloglovin VS Feedly - Finding My Alternative to Google Reader

I've recently been trying out both Feedly and Bloglovin, trying to find an alternative to Google Reader that suits me best. For good or bad, these are my conclusions - but please remember that these are thoughts filtered through my preferences in what I want from my feed reader.... naturally others may have different priorities!

I registered with FEEDLY first, mainly because it seemed to be a larger site, and it allowed me to see full versions of each post (which is the way I personally prefer to browse the blogs I follow) without having to select them individually.

You can toggle up and down between posts easily using the J and K keys on your keyboard, and feedly automatically marks posts as read when you move on to the next one. (You can customise this and a lot of other viewing options in the settings.)

Another good feature is the floating button Feedly adds to your browser, so that when you come across a new site you would like to follow it is very easy to add it to your following list.

The only problem I had was with the way Feedly seemed to decide which posts I would look at - I'd reach the end of the stream, but there were still posts there that I hadn't read. I'd then have to go to the list on the side bar and click individual sites to read the unread posts, which was really annoying. (Maybe there is another solution to this, but if so I haven't found it!)

I follow these blogs because I want to read their new posts - all of them!

At this point I registered with Bloglovin.

BLOGLOVIN is also a pretty good site, and I found it a bit easier to navigate than Feedly.

It displays snippets of all unread posts, fading them as you mark them as read, but still visible so easy to find if you want to go back to a particular post.

To read the post in full you click on the title, and it takes you to the original post page, where you can read and comment without having to switch pages. This means you are actually visiting the blog and therefore contributing to the author's visitor count, which is a big plus!

At the top of the page is a bloglovin tool bar that lets you toggle directly to the page of the next unread post (cutting out that repetitive step of switching back to the bloglovin home page) and also clearly tracks how many posts are still unread. On the far right of this tool bar there are sharing buttons (twitter, facebook and pinterest), making it easy to 'like' posts and pin ideas for the future.

To follow a new blog (if they don't have a 'Follow Me At Bloglovin' button) you need to cut and paste the URL into Bloglovin's search bar - not really a problem, but not quite as easy as Feedly.

So at the moment Bloglovin ticks most of the boxes for me! What are your thoughts? Have you taken the plunge and found your alternative to Google Reader? And more to the point, has anyone investigated any of the (many) other feed readers out there and found something fabulous? If you have, please share!