In The Paint

Here’s another one.

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.

Ok, this post is about art and my trip to Ottawa. The purpose of this trip was to visit the National Gallery to see the exhibition Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome. This was a great exhibition although a little overwhelming. My hubby and I decided to get the audio guides which we did not enjoy. We felt that the narrator was just describing the paintings without much information about the artist and the technique.

My favourite part of the exhibition was the area that had three or four paintings of Judith with the head of Holophernes. This included the painting by Artemesia Gentileschi, which I looked at and discussed with my grade 8s last year.

I don’t have any photos of the NG but I have photos of some other art that we found around the city: have I mentioned that I’m also a history teacher?

Here is Nelly McClung fighting for women’s suffrage:

Queen Elizabeth II:

Joseph Brandt:

The coolest place we went was the Diefenbunker. This is a cold war bunker turned museum that was created to shelter the government should a nuclear weapon hit Ottawa.

On a sadder note, we heard the news that Jack Layton, Leader of the Opposition, passed away just a couple of hours before we went to spend the day on Parliament Hill. Below is the beginning of a pile of flowers and tributes for him as well as the Peace Tower with the flag at half-mast. It was an emotional day.

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.)

Here are how some of the lightbox photos turned out:

And here are some outdoor photos that the campers took:

Here is a painting that I did recently. Last year my husband and I travelled to Fergus and Elora, Ontario for a weekend getaway and I took plenty of pictures and am only now getting to paint from them.

For this one I loved the colours in the sky and the yellow in the landscape. These small paintings are so much fun!

Well after a year of teaching grades 7 and 8 Art, I’m now back at art camp with the 8-10 year olds. We finished a week of sculpture and did a few challenging projects that turned out really great in the end. I didn’t get too many photos of the work because my hands were busy sewing or gluing up until home-time on Friday. Here’s a picture of our balsa foam robot and fabric bird.

I bought the book “Countyside Softies” by Amy Adams and was inspired to try sewing with this group of campers.

It was more challenging than I anticipated and that was after I modified the instructions, fabric, and stitches, to suit the age group. But I might just be crazy enough to do it again later in the summer because the kids loved it and they turned out great!

This year for March Break Camp the theme was Pop Art. We looked at classic Andy Warhol silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and at some recent works by Douglas Coupland based on the Warhol images and came up with these works of art.

Silk screen tote bag by 9 year old camper

Acrylic silhouette collage by 11 year old camper

Silk screen on acrylic wash by 12 year old camper

Silk screen on acrylic wash by 8 year old camper

Acrylic 3D collage

This past fall session of my Saturday classes, the students spent a day on photography. We were very lucky last session with great weather and were able to outside to sketch take photos on more than one day. The students in this class are between 11 and 15 years old.

Click on image to see full photo.

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: