Thanksgiving Turkeys!

Gobble-gobble-gobble!

We made turkeys!

This 3-dimensional turkey is a challenging engineering S.T.E.A.M. project. 

But don't tell the kids that. It's just a fun pop-up turkey we made for Thanksgiving!

First the tail is painted and folded accordion-style. Then the turkey is colored with oil pastel, cut out, folded, and attached to a plate of the artist's own design. 













The tail, the plate, and the rest of the table setting are all glued to the folded table top, and wa la! 

An amazing pop-up turkey!

We also made these colorful turkey paintings! 

We drew them with oil pastel and added patterns and designs while pressing hard. Then we added liquid watercolor and saw the oil pastel resist the color.
We cut out our turkeys and glued them to construction paper. 

Then we cut out a LOT of autumn leaves using our die cut machine (fun!!!) and glued them to the background.  Gobble-gobble!

Park Bench

Park Bench in Autumn, 12 x 16 tempera on paper

Our home schoolers created this painting of a park bench in the fall while learning about perspective and color relationships.

This is liquid tempera on      12 x 16 watercolor paper. 




Before starting the painting, we looked at a variety of park bench photos like this one. 






And this one. 
We practiced sketching them from an angle.






Then we taped our paper to a painting board and painted our background using vertical prismatic strokes in the upper area and horizontal strokes along the bottom. The path is painted in cool colors and the rest is warm autumn colors. 


After the paint was dry, we added the tree trunks in the distance and the darker thicker ones in the foreground. We added leaves in the trees and falling to the ground using short strokes and dabs of paint.








Lastly, we added the little park bench using a detail brush. 

After the paint was dry, we carefully removed the tape to reveal a lovely white border around our paintings. 

Painting Nature's Heart

These Young Women from Moreland and their adult leaders dropped by the Art Center this week to paint this little landscape, called Nature's Heart.

First they painted they distant mountains, shoreline, and reflections in the lake.

 
Then they painted the silhouette in the foreground - rocks, trees, fern fronds, grasses, leaves, vines, and butterflies!

Fox's First Fall

It's this young fox's first autumn and he is watching the leaves swirling in the wind as they fall from the trees. Maybe he is a little confused...  maybe he is wondering why the sky is falling and his world is changing. 

To create this painting, we first observed pictures of young foxes. We looked at the shape of the head and body, the brightly colored fur, and beautiful fluffy tails.



Then we drew the basic shape of the fox, step-by-step, making sure the fox was large enough to fill the paper.

We chose oil pastels in 'fox' and 'autumn leaf' colors. We used them to outline our fox again, this time adding a furry texture around the body and added black details; and we drew lots of leaves swirling around the fox for him to look at. 





With liquid tempera, we painted the background light blue and green grass along the bottom. We painted the fox a light peach color (which we mixed using yellow, orange, and white) and we painted his white fur a brownish-grayish color (burnt sienna, blue, gray, and white).

We added two more brownish-orange colors using short brush strokes to create a furry texture, and we added white highlights into the white fur. 

Another option was to add short brush strokes of color into the background to create a "blustery-day" look, as in this sample.








The last step was to stand back and decide how to 'finish' the painting. 

We decided to add a few more details with oil pastel details over the dried paint.


What adorable little foxes!

Autumn Reflections

We call this one "Autumn Reflections." 

It's sort of an illusion that we created using collage and gouache (pronounced gwash) (like squash).



First we observed reflected autumn colors from photos in our resource file. We have lots of autumn scenes to look at, like this one:

We decided tearing would work better than cutting to make a natural looking scene. We carefully tore a long skinny land mass from a folded piece of brown construction paper, unfolded it, and glued it along the center for our horizon line. 

Using the gouache, we painted clouds in the sky and the reflected (mirrored) clouds in the water. Tricky!

Then we tore our trees from folded paper of various autumn colors, unfolded, and separated them. 

We glued them along the top and bottom of the land mass to create a mirror image in the lake. We also placed a few smaller trees in front of larger ones. 

Each tree was then painted (plus its reflection) and dabs of color were placed on the land mass to represent fallen leaves.

We now created "water" by adding wiggly white horizontal lines right over the tree reflections.