Needlepoint Canvas Painting

I haven't been posting a lot in the last few months, but I have been busy working on my art.

One thing I have been trying to do is to paint on needlepoint canvas.  A friend of mine (that's you, MK) told me that there are people who will pay to have custom art painted for them to stitch in.  I decided I'd give it a whirl.

I figured out how to break a photo into sections of color that could be stitched, but my color mixing needs some work.  The colors I was using seemed to match the photographs until I actually painted them.  My suspicion is that the white spaces in the canvas make the colors look grayed out.  I'm not even sure that the colors need to match thread exactly.  If you just give a roadmap to where the differences in color occur, can you give a legend to it with the real colors?  I need to explore a bit more.

Wang Yani - Chinese Brush Painting

This is an old favorite of a lesson.  I got it either from School Arts or Arts and Activities twenty some years ago.

I used to do it with kindergarten, but this year it seemed to fall flat with them.  Since both grades did Chinese Dragon puppets last time, I continued the Chinese theme with both grades as well.

I showed a PowerPoint to my students, that had photos of Wang Yani as a little girl/artist.  It included photos of many of her monkey paintings.  Then we looked at a short YouTube video of her.

I led them through the steps of painting with a bamboo brush and painting a monkey.  Then I let them paint another picture of their choice of animals.

    

First Summer Projects

Because this school year was so busy, I felt too drained to do many projects on my own at home.  My first two days of summer break, I sat....bored.  That's an unusual state for me.  Normally I stay busy all the time.

When I started thinking about having a classroom again next school year, I got excited.  My brain started gearing up with thoughts of how I could set it up.  Looking at three 20" x 24" canvases that a friend gave me, I saw the three letters "a", "r" and "t."  So that's what I painted on them.

 I had so much fun painting them yesterday, I wish I had more to do today.

Projects for today:  yogurt making and crochet.

Inspired by Marc Chagal

 These are block tempera paintings done by  my fifth graders.  It was based on an old lesson from my county's art curriculum.  The original lesson was a chalk drawing inspired by Marc Chagal.  My room this year is teensy weensy, and just not a good space for chalk.  (Think along the lines of me breathing chalk all day for a couple of weeks.)  So, we painted instead.

The kids discussed abstract art and what Chagal might have been thinking about when he painted "I and the Village" and several other pieces.  They then had to list people, places and ideas that were important to them.  Next, they represented those things in an abstract manner with symbols.  I directed them to break up the spaces with overlapping shapes.  They drew the work in Sharpie first, the filled in the color with block tempera.  I am pleased with the results, even more than I was with the chalk drawings.

Grade Four - Moving Figures

Hairy Cave People...I Think

I was browsing my humongous iPhoto gallery on my laptop and saw this.  It was taken two years ago. I have no idea who did it or even what grade they were in.

Sometimes kids don't get how to paint clothes on people, so my guess is that they were attempting clothes.  But........doesn't it look like hairy cave people to you?  I'm thinking it could have been worse.

Its a Party Week for Audubon!

I heard within the last week that a book of John James Audubon's prints was sold and brought the highest price ever paid for a book.  The news had a fun connection for me this week as I was teaching a kindergarten lesson in which an Audubon print was the focus.

My students looked at a print of Audubon's turkey and discussed what they saw.  I thought it was interesting that some of them didn't identify the bird as a turkey because it didn't have its fan up.

To draw a turkey, they named the shapes that they saw on the turkey and painted those shapes on their papers.

They've been learning about pattern so they painted an inventive pattern on their turkeys.

These birds look like decorations for an Audubon party.

Arbitrary Color ala Franz Marc

These paintings were done by second graders, who spend a lot of their year studying animals.  We looked at the paintings of Franz Marc and discussed arbitrary color.

Fall Landscapes - Grade 2

My second graders studied multiple works by Grant Wood.  They learned the terms "background," "foreground," "middleground," and "overlapping."  They also attempted to depict depth in a painting.

I hope these pieces made it home unfolded...uncrumpled...and unmarred.  I would hang any one of these in my home.

Paintbrush Song

A preschool teacher just appeared at my door asking if I minded her teaching the kids my "Happy Paintbrush" song.  I forgot I even made up that song.  I need to collect these things!

If you're teaching preschool or even kindergarten, you might sing this ditty to keep those brushes from the dreaded "pencil hold."

Sing to the tune of London Bridges…and demo the position a "happy paintbrush" would take...

Happy paint brush stands straight up

Stands straight up

Stands straight up

Happy paint brush stands straight up.

All day long.  

This song will make you nuts….haunt you in your dreams….but the kids love it.

Squirrel Nutkin and Deja Vu

I was reminded today of those movies where someone dreams an event and then it happens. This time, however, it centered around a kindergarten lesson I taught.

This week we read Beatrix Potter's "Squirrel Nutkin."


Do you know the story about Squirrel Nutkin? It's the story about a squirrel who instead of gathering nuts with the other squirrels, spent his time pestering a wise old owl. Eventually he pestered the owl so much, the owl pulled off Squirrel Nutkin's tail.

So here's the deja vu part. M and I were out in the yard today picking up sticks. I got to a spot where the ground was oddly dug up. I wondered what on earth had happened there.



Then I saw this.

Poor Squirrel Nutkin. I guess our resident barred owl had him for dinner.

Thinking with Blocks

My school's staff has been trained to use ThinkBlocks.  My friends who have had more training in ThinkBlocks say that they help students think in a natural way, but not necessarily a way that we are use to teaching.  It helps students make connections and distinctions between things.  (This is a most elementary explanation, as I am an absolute newbie to this, or a "white belt" as they call it.)

I've tried using the ThinkBlocks a couple of times, but felt as though I really didn't know what I was doing.  My classroom neighbor told me to start with something simple like having the kids tell you the "what is" and "what is not" a part of something.

In kindergarten today, my students were starting to paint the faces on their self portraits.  Instead of having them list the parts of the face that they needed to include, I had them tell me things that were or were not part of the face.  Naturally, I got "eyes," "nose" and "mouth." When kids suggested "ears" and "neck" there was disagreement about which block group these should go; "not a part of a face" or "part of a face."  It was interesting to hear 5 year olds defend their reasoning.  In the end, they decided that while both of those touch the face, some people might consider them part of the face and others might consider them not part of the face, so we stuck those blocks in the middle.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I am excited to start using the blocks.  I want to keep thinking of ways to use the tools and dig deeper.

What I Have My Hand In

Here's a glimpse of some of the art I've been watching progress over the past month.

Second graders have been learning about Grant Wood's painting, American Gothic.  They also learned how to overlap objects to create an illusion of depth.  

    

I love preschool lessons.   Here they explored markmaking with block tempera for the first time.

 

 Kindergarteners, who were learning shapes, made pictures of things out of tangram blocks and then drew from that.

  

Fourth graders have been learning how to draw the human figure in proportion and then to draw it showing motion.

    

Fifth graders learned how to draw from still life arrangements.

 

Having not really drawn from observation before, they appear truly excited to see how well they do

A lot of evenings I feel disappointed at how little of my own artwork I have engaged in that day.  However, if you count all the things I have "had my hand in" at school, I think I can give myself a bit of credit for at least that effort.

Miss Tee's Wild Ride

Hi there.......My apologies for not being around much lately. I've had company which was a good thing. And I've had allergies which have been a not so good thing. (@#$%^&* ragweed.)

This snip is of my granddaughter riding a bike. She and her Mom flew cross country to stay in Virginia for a week. "Miss Tee" was very worried that there would not be a bike for her at my exceedingly bikey house, so my friend, Blink, loaned me one.

Watching her ride was amazing! How on earth that bike ever stayed upright, I'll never know. She would ride with the bike at a 45 degree angle and stay upright. She'd turn her head plumb backwards to look at something, and not fall over. Girls just got balance I guess.

She and Papa rode several times on the beautiful new bike trail near our house. When she rode on the dirt path in the little hills that lead to the trail she would yell, "Look Papa! I'm mountain biking!" It warmed our little bikey hearts.

Drug Out by Dragons

Looking at my photo disk, I am surprised to see so many dragon photos. There are more dragon lessons that I did not even photograph. Chinese New Year coincided with the third grade study of China this year so there were lots of opportunities for the dragon as subject matter.

Preschoolers made Chinese dragon masks, which all together looked like one big dragon costume.

Third graders made Chinese brush paintings of dragons and foil repousse dragons, for which I have no photos. Ugh.

This dragon puppet was a "door knob lesson." (That means you think of the lesson as you are shutting the door after they arrive.) I had a lesson prepared other than this, but when 3/4 of the class was missing because of testing, I had to think of something fast. This was it.


Art Club kids made clay animals and many chose dragons.



Kindergarten dragons. (Those red tree-like things are firecrackers.)






A third grade teacher asked me to help her think of something she could hang in the hall outside of her classroom. Since they were studying Ancient China, I had her kids work in groups to create dragon murals. These are 5' - 6' long. I suggested that she cut these off of the background and mount them on another paper, or paint the background.






I think I am "dragoned" out now.