Grumpy Cats, and Thank You Pinterest (Again!!)

Talia (Yr 1)

Today marks the first week of our third term - and for various personal reasons I had nothing prepared!! Pinterest to the rescue!

My heartfelt thanks to Mary at MaryMaking and Kathy at Art Projects for Kids for their Grumpy Cat lessons :) I showed the kids a Youtube video of Tardar Sauce the Grumpy Cat, and we were away!

We drew our Grumpy Cats with black marker (semi-guided drawing lesson, but with lots of encouragement for them to give their cats their own personalities - we even had some happy grumpy cats!) and smudged brown and black soft pastel. Then we created a background with felt pen, taking a line for a walk over the page. Cut and glue on our cats, and the finished products are really great!

In A Parallel World.....

Students started with an action photo of themselves standing in front of a blank wall.

Their challenge was to create a shadow of themselves in a parallel world - a bit like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland or the Narnia books. This world exists side by side with ours, and only needs a window or door to step from one into the other.

Like Peter Pan, their shadow can have a life of it's own. Instead of merely copying their real-life body, it should express something important about who they are - perhaps something they love to do like art, music or sport. It might even be symbolic - a lion, a playful rabbit, a dragon!

Finally, we created the background on the wall with watercolour pencil, imagining it as a window into a parallel world.

This project was inspired by this wonderful lesson which I found at Mini Matisse well over a year ago, and have had in mind ever since. It's a perfect project to finish the term, with loads of opportunity for students to stretch their imaginations!

This is our last lesson this term - our 2 week winter break starts now. Happy holidays!!

Cat Paper Sculptures (thank you Andy Warhol!)

After admiring some of Pop artist Andy Warhol's cats (see selection below) we made Cat Sculptures using slotted cardboard. Like Andy's 25 Cats named Sam, our cats are brightly coloured and each has a very unique personality!

From '25 Cats Name Same and One Blue Pussy' by Andy Warhol:

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Rousseau-ish Mixed Media Jungles

We looked at Rousseau's 'Surprised! (Tropical Storm with a Tiger)'. We especially enjoyed the way the artist makes us feel as though we are inside the picture, with the wild jungle all around us, and decided that one of the ways he has achieved this is by making the plants large and overlapping so that we catch only glimpses of the sky through the foliage, and they extend out beyond the frame of the picture like a photograph.

The kids were also interested to find out that Rousseau didn't actually travel to the exotic places he painted, instead adapting and enlarging his favourite plants and flowers to make them appear like a luxuriant tropical scene.

We used torn paper mounted on a black mount and watercolor resist  to create our jungle backgrounds, pulling our plants up to the top of the page and beyond so that they tower over our heads and draw us into the picture. We filled our jungles with overlapping grasses and plants, vines and exotic flowers and animals.

While our backgrounds dried, we drew jungle animals onto brown paper with black markers, and we filled the spaces around our animals with leaf shapes before adding more colour with wax crayons.

Finally, we collaged the animals and leaves onto our backgrounds, overlapping into the torn border to bring them forward in the page and add depth to our compositions.

Our finished pictures are fabulous - very Rousseau-ish indeed!

An Australian Starry Night

Hollie (Yr 3)

The Starry Night is an iconic Van Gogh painting that we've used as inspiration for our art this week. When I recently saw this free lesson download at The Art of Education, I couldn't resist doing our own version.

Looking at the real deal on WikiPaintings, we especially made note of the dark detailed foreground and Van Gogh's swirling interpretation of the wind (or space) around the stars.We created our sky by drawing lots of movement lines with white and blue Crayola Color Sticks on purple paper. We then drew our foreground on a 3/4 sheet of black contruction paper and then traced over all our lines with either silver or gold sharpies before cutting it out and gluing it onto the purple sheet.

Students had complete freedom in creating their foregrounds, within the Australian theme. They produced a wide variety of settings, including bush scenes with gum trees and koalas, Ularu, the Sydney Opera House and (closer to home) the Mooloolaba Spit with it's lighthouse and water tower.

The final step was to create our stars using eraser-tipped pencils dipped into red, yellow, white and orange paint to create a variety of star-like patterns. The challenge was to try to make each star different!

This is a great lesson to illustrate the difference between copying other's art, and using it as an inspiration.

The kids produced some fabulous work on this project, I just love them!!

Paddy Art #3 Tulips

Although I have some wonderful group projects planned, at the moment I'm going with individual pieces that can be completed within the one session. My darling group of elderly people with dementia really need that instant reward for their efforts!

This week I found a lovely picture of tulips on line. It's a free printable but unfortunately my watercolour paper is too thick for the printer so I redrew it several times and pre-painted the backgrounds in blues and purples. This provided my group with section (of tulips) that they can paint, and an artistic choice while removing the confusion of too many lines and blank spaces.

Go here to learn more about how I have come to modify some of my teaching beliefs and practices (in particular the use of colouring sheets) when creating art with people with advanced dementia.

We started with a palette of red, yellow and fluorescent pink, then I later added two shades of green to the colour choices. I provided the green later to avoid mixing muddy colours.

They seem to prefer the painting process over colouring (see our Goldfish wax crayon resist project last week). I think this is because they get an instant result, and strong vibrant colours.

We had so many great successes with this painting! Although many residents (sadly including my lovely mum) are simply unable to focus for more than a moment or two, there are several who, like Rae, June and Rose, spent a whole hour painting, and only stopped because it was lunch time! It is so rewarding to see their satisfaction and pride in their art work.... :)

Go here to see all my Paddy Projects!!

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.

With my art students, the lesson is all about developing new skills and building on previous learning. At Paddy it is about maintaining skills that are fast disappearing. What is important from their sessions is not necessarily the end result (a completed work of art 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.

It has taken me some time to get my head around this, and to embrace the colouring sheet concept for Paddy.

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!