In The Paint

I’ve been busy lately with a lot of different art projects and have been trying new things. I did two artworks on Adobe Illustrator for two adorable little people turning one this month. The background patterns are created using their initial(s). They were printed (without the In The Paint watermark) and framed in a nice white frame. These are the first projects I have done since taking an Illustrator course and I’m happy with the way they turned out.

I went out one morning before work this past summer for a quick photo walk. This is painted from one of the photos I took.

I’ve been doing more of the tiny paintings on 5″x7″ paper.

More to come…

So camp is over now but I wanted to share a few of the projects I’ve done with the kids over the last four weeks. During this time I was working 8-10 year olds.
The first pieces are the bird soft sculptures. The kids loved this! They loved sewing and wanted to do more.

This group was excited about everything we did. The next activity was a wire tree sculpture. (Thanks Liz for the idea!)
We used 20 gauge wire to create the trunk, roots, and branches. We then attached it to a piece of foam board with clay. Some of the kids got creative with this and went up the trunk with clay or made little birds or squirrels to put into the branches.
Then we took thinner, coloured wire and curled and wrapped it around the branches to make leaves. Here are the results:

In another class the kids did silkscreen silhouettes. We did a photo shoot for two projects and the kids took turns taking photos of each other. For one project they were making funny faces or hamming it up for the camera while for the silkscreen project they shot each other in profile.
We then printed a rectangle of one colour and then their silhouette in another colour.

We also did one version where we collaged onto the paper before the last step so that image would be about them and their interests. I didn’t like the final look of that.

For these last two projects, I found I had to simplify the steps for this group. They were not as “in to it” as other groups and their attention was difficult to keep. We also did silkscreen, but onto tote bags. And to add sculpture to the mix we learned how to draw dinosaurs and then sculpted one out of plasticene.

Well, those were some of my favourite art projects from the last few weeks (or the ones that I took pictures of.)

Saturday night was the opening of AWOL’s Square Foot Show. This was my first time participating or even attending and I was impressed with the overall quality of the work. It’s a non-juried show and the accepts 500 artists to show one to three works of art.

This is what the walls looked like:

It was a very busy and warm in the space so we walked out in the rain looking for cold drinks afterwards. It took us a while but ended up at Ossington and Dundas in a classic diner called Lakeview Restaurant. The atmosphere was great as was the food. I had a banana smoothie, and my husband had a shepherd’s pie.

Recently a Golden representative did a presentation at one of my places of work. I had never used used Golden paints before because they are a little pricier than other brands and because I usually paint in oils and not acrylics. At the end of the presentation we got a little loot bag full of Golden goodies and I couldn’t wait to use them. When I got home I started this painting with a limited palette of fluid Indian Yellow Hue, Manganese Blue Hue, Alizarine Crimson Hue (all samples from the bag of goodies) and Titanium White of a different brand. After the first layer I added Golden’s open Red Oxide and Sap Green Hue to my palette.

I loved the way these paints went on the canvas. It was easier to blend and dry brush looked great as well. It still dried quickly on the palette but while moist had a nice creamy feel. I think I have been converted to Golden.

Here is the finished piece. Thank you Stephanie for being my model! This and another portrait will be part of AWOL Gallery’s Square Foot Show from August 6th to 21st.

Here are how some of the lightbox photos turned out:

And here are some outdoor photos that the campers took:

This past week I had 14 11-15 year olds and we were learning about photography. The campers all had point-and-shoot cameras so it was pretty basic concepts that we were talking about such as composition and lighting. Again, the hardest thing for the group was to focus on the point of interest. We had many beautifully lit and composed flower pictures where the greenery behind the flower was what was in focus. But I think they got better as the week went along.

The first thing we did this week (after taking our first set of photographs) was to create a folio to put our work in. We used matte board, scrapbooking paper, envelopes, elastic chord, glue sticks, glue gun, and duct tape. These were easy to make and turned out great. It also helped that I had someone cut the matte board for me so that it was ready to go on Monday.

Here are a couple of results:

13 yr old camper

In the last photo you can see some of the activities we did. The blue square paper is a sunprint; at the back is a journaling page with different stencilling and painting techniques; and at the front is a faux-polaroid, the idea for which I got from a book on journaling techniques.

This coming week, I’m teaching Digital Photography to 11-15 year olds. I thought it would be a fun activity to make light-boxes so we could photograph small objects.

Having never done this before, I made my prototype out of a cardboard box and cut out a rectangle from the top, and the sides of the box. I then painted the inside with white gesso. On the outside I covered the rectangle with white tissue paper. I taped a white piece of paper on the inside of the box on which to place an object on and then placed lights from a desk lamp so that the light shone through the tissue paper.

Here are some of my results. I hope the campers end up with great results as well.

The lightbox doesn't look pretty but it works.