In The Paint

The final week of summer camp has passed; the clean-up is complete and I’ve had a week to relax before I have to think about my adult classes that begin in the fall.
The last week my 8-10 year olds focussed on landscapes. We did painting, printmaking, and photography, and went outside to do some sketching. The kids really focussed on their first painting which was an acrylic on masonite board after Tom Thomson. After the ground was covered with a burnt orange, the kids were restricted to using only a palette knife.
Here are a couple of results:

The next piece that the group did was an acrylic on canvas after artist Dorothy Knowles. I was attempting to get the kids to understand the different paint applications that artists use. While Tom Thomson applied the paint in thick short brush strokes, Dorothy Knowles layers washes.
Here are two of the final pieces:

This week my group of 8 to 10 year olds focussed on sculpture. We used paper clay, papiér maché, and plasticene for various projects. However, my favourite project was making monsters out of air dry clay. The monsters turned out great! Here are some monsters before and after they were painted with acrylic paint:

I was sick for most of week 3 so I’m skipping to week 4.
This past week and this week we have been travelling through time visiting different art periods. The first stop on our trip was the 1940s Quebec. We looked at the group of artist known as Les Automatistes led by Paul-Emile Borduas and then created our own automatic paintings. The first group of paintings were created with solucryl. The campers started with sponging the paint on. Then they used palette knives. The next steps were using straws to blow the paint around, schpritz bottles to spray the paint on, and finally dripping the paint on from paint brushes.
The second group of paintings are very small acrylics on scraps of canvas paper. The kids finger painted it on.

Stay tuned for more Time Machine art work…

This past weekend I participated in a local Art In The Park.  It was the first time I have done one of these art shows in a long time and while it was a disappointing weekend (low traffic) I would like to do more in the future. My talented husband built the walls that the paintings are hung on.  They were very sturdy during the windy weekend. Here are some photos of my set-up:

Click on the thumbnails to see the entire photo.

Last week at camp our theme for the 8 to 10 year olds was Urban Art.  The irony of course is that we were in a suburban setting neighboring on conservation land.

For our first project we gave the kids “street names” and they had to create a graffiti tag.  Then they did canvas paintings using these tags.  Here are two examples:

For the next project we created stencils and used fabric spray paint to transfer them onto t-shirts.  Check these out:

And last but not least, we spent a morning doing printmaking.  The first image is my example.  On the right is matte board with foam glued onto it creating the stamp and on the left is the print.  Below are two examples by two different students.  The kids were told to create a robot, monster, or an alien.  At first the girls whined and tried to claim that these were “boy” things, but they got into it pretty quickly.  (The middle one was done by a girl and the bottom one was done by a boy.)

If you have any great ideas on this topic, please share!

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of teaching, volunteering, and taking courses and haven’t been painting too much.  Here is one piece that I just started last week in acrylic and then moved to oil. I started this one pretty loose and hope to keep it that way by the end. I still needs some adjustments of the hair and clothes and colour in general. I started off dark and will go lighter in the face as I continue. This is a portrait of a friend of mine.  I would like to do a larger painting of her at some point.  I can’t wait to post the final painting.

This is a painting that started as a demo in an adult acrylic painting class that I’m teaching. I was demonstrating how to start a painting by finding the main shapes and tones and building up from there. Afterwards in my studio, I worked the painting to completion in oil. I often like to use acrylic as an underpainting as it is fast drying.

This painting is available for purchase here.

I just finished a week of teaching art to a group of children ages 8 to 12 years old. We covered a lot of ground in just five days which included painting, printmaking, and sculpture. The kids all did some great work.
One activity which took a full day for most of the kids to complete was an abstract acrylic painting. The kids got a piece of 7″ x 7″ watercolour paper and created a collage using magazines. They were instructed to look for textures and to make different piles for different colours. When they had the different piles, they then intuitively chose pieces that they thought would work well together and composed a design.
Once their collages were finished, we then drew the design onto canvas that was one ft. squared. We talked about colour theory and my assistant and I worked with the kids individually on colour mixing. Here’s an example of one of the finished pieces:

artwork by a 9 year old student