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.

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.

In January I made a New Years’ Resolution that I would fill up my sketchbook. Every page. I don’t think I’ve filled a sketchbook since high school. I made this resolution out loud and in front of my Grade 7 students. I was encouraging them to use their sketchbooks more to plan, experiment, and sketch in. I’ve been using mine as sketchbook/journal. I am more than half way through the book and through the year.

Lately I’ve been thinking about photo-transfers. Next week at art camp I’ll be teaching 11-15 year olds Digital Photography and we’ll be doing a lot of collage and mixed media involving photo-transfers.

This first one uses two methods. For the image of the sale boats I used Golden’s Super Loaded Matte Medium and the transfer only takes about three minutes. And for the skyline I did a packing tape transfer that my friend Stephanie taught me. Thanks Stephanie!!

This sketchbook page is about my day at the Toronto Islands watching the Dragon Boat Races.

Here are a couple more sketchbook pages:

That’s my photo buddy aka my brother. I got the idea for a faux photobooth picture from a journaling book I bought on sale at Indigo.

The pears started as an acrylic still life demo for my adult painting class and was later cut up and added to the sketchbook.

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.