More Ice Skaters!

We've got more Ice Skaters!

These skaters are skating on a snowy day, unlike our previously posted Olympic skaters. 

My sample

Polar Bear Art!

To celebrate International Polar Bear Day (yes, that's a thing), our home schoolers made polar bear art! 

This artwork is created with soft white pastels and charcoal on black construction paper. When completed, the bear is carefully cut out and glued to a painted watercolor/salt background, which we painted at the beginning of class (to give it time to dry and allow the salt to do its job).

 

 

Now I'm not going to say that all of these animals look like polar bears. We had quite a time examining the bearlike features of polar bears and worked hard to duplicate them in our art, but also had a good laugh as we created these creatures, which could have been many different animals along the way - a goat, a badger, a prairie dog, and so on and so forth. We may not have ended up with polar bears, but we did practice working with shading and highlighting and creating animal-like features. 

We like our little critters! 

                                             

This last one is a simplified version made by a 7-year-old member of our homeschool art club. Now THIS looks like a polar bear... and also a little like the cute little artist! 

All of the artwork shown above was created by our teenage home schoolers.

More Winter Olympics!

During the last week of the 2018 Winter Olympics, we created  tonal winterscapes with an added snow sports athlete to create these Winter Olympic commemorative mixed media paintings.



This was great practice in working with a limited palette of cool colors, mixing tints and shades to create various color tones, and painting landscapes in perspective. Just look at this student's  palette of colors: mint greens, icy blues, and lots of lovely shades of lavender! 

It was also fun to choose and color a winter "athlete" to insert into the scene. Cutting out the athlete and placing it in just the right place, and maybe adding a shadow, made it possible to create an awesome 3-dimensional image gliding along the ice or sailing through the air!

The idea for this project came from Deep Space Sparkle. We altered it somewhat to add our own Olympic athletes and stickers.

Ice Skaters

The 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea have been a big subject of conversation at the art center these past two weeks.    Our students have enjoyed snow boarding, skiing, & bobsledding. However, ice skating seems to be the most popular with our students: ice hockey, speed skating, and especially figure skating! So... our Paint Your ART Out class created Winter Olympics-themed artwork that celebrated ice skating.   

This is a mixed media project that involves several different processes including pattern design, watercolor/oil pastel resist, collage, and construction with unusual elements (aluminum foil and craft sticks). So, yes, art class gets quite messy as you can see in this photo. 

First the skates are cut out from black or white poster board. We also punched holes for our yarn laces and we decorated the skates with markers. We then wrap and shape a strip of foil around a craft stick, glue it down, and glue to the bottom of a skate, and repeat. 

Next, we lay the skates on a piece of white construction paper, rearranging until the skates are posed to skate! Using a pencil, we add the legs, usually one straight and one bent in front or behind the other. Knees are essential for the bent legs! 

Using oil pastels, outline the legs and add one or more interesting patterns to indicate tights, socks, and/or leggings, and maybe a skirt. Fill in the patterns with watercolor to create the pastel resist, allow to dry, and cut out the legs. 

Place the legs and the skates on a piece of light blue or grey construction paper. Note: It's okay if the skates extend beyond the edges of the background paper. When you like the arrangement, glue it down!

We also created simple Olympic 'stickers' to add to our commemorative 2018 Winter Olympic artwork! 

Tiger Eye!

For several weeks our young students had been asking to paint a Tiger Eye, based on two acrylic paintings of tigers displayed in our studio. 


The challenge for me was to create a simplified version of the Tiger Eye that even the youngest students could successfully complete using thier own color choices and personal style; all within a class period time frame of 1-1/2 hours.


I decided to print the basic shapes on a 11" x 15" piece of heavy white paper for each child, to avoid the stress of trying to draw the image themselves. The focus of the project was instead on color selection and design, paint mixing and blending, creating details, and overall satisfactory completion of the project. 

Using cake temperas, they first filled in some of the black stripes to make better sense of the overall patterns in the image. 

Then, while the stripes dried, they decided what type of tiger they were going to paint: 


a realistic Indian or white tiger, or maybe a rainbow, or an avatar tiger? 






They painted the eye colors and details first, then filled in the rest of the tiger's face. 

If needed, they then went back and redefined/repainted some of the stripes and other details. Some also added glitter to complete their tigers with style!

Finally, their tiger's whiskers were added with a metallic Sharpie.

Aren't they awesome?

 

 

Heart Grids!

A textured heart grid, by Jim Dine

Our home school art club (HSAC) created these Jim Dine-style mixed media heart grids as a cooperative art project.

Mixed media included oil pastels, stamping, temperas, collage, crayon resist, watercolor, and ink.

Each artist created at least one art paper and pieces were cut and shared with the other artists. Also, each artist created one personal doodle art heart to use in his or her own artwork.

Artists had to decide which pieces would be used as hearts, and which would become backgrounds. Then the elements were carefully arranged on a square sheet of black construction paper and glued down.