ART MEDIA

Daily Art #2 – Lemon Love – 5/29/23

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My aunt gifted me these fabulous lemon fabrics and I finally got inspired to use them. I love lemons so I decided to make a little quilt square highlighting my love of lemons. It took a while to do the stitching, but it was fun. It was also interesting working with a mostly yellow color palette because I usually stick to pinks and blues and greens. I wanna make more with yellow though.

Thinking about: lemon yellow painting, making a big quilt with all my tinier quilt squares/rectangles

Listening to: Karma Taylor Swift & Barber: Adagio for Strings

I made the knit swatch in the lower left corner in high school art class when I found one knitting needle and yarn and I used a pencil for the other knitting needle. I’ve held onto it for the past 6 years and I’ve finally used it in a project. I love scraps that can be combined into art later on in my life. Revisiting old memories and pieces from the past and incorporating them into something new.

Daily Art #1 – 5/28/23

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I’m trying to do at least one art every day. Daily art can include any media, any craft, any artistic gesture. I’m gonna try to keep track on here or somewhere so I can hold myself accountable. Also trying to keep the prompt loose/broad/forgiving so I can still think about art every day and not feel pressured to make something really detailed and time-forever-taking. That’s why it can be simply an artistic gesture.

Daily Art/Craft/Gesture Ideas

  • Drawing
  • Painting
  • Printmaking
  • Textiles – Knitting/Crochet/Sewing
  • Natural objects arranged in a pattern
  • Line drawing in sand
  • Poem
  • Brain dump
  • Doodle
  • Sketch

Here’s today’s sketch. I just drew and scribbled with colored pencils. Matisse the chameleon and a selfie with a fidget toy on top of my face and lines and ceilings and walls and windows and space.

Words: tired, ugly, messy

Thinking about: chameleon peaceful green, bright pink, ugly olive chartreuse green

Music: Barbie Princess and the Pauper

New Work

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A while ago, probably 3 months ago, I had a dream where I was painting a painting. As soon as I woke up, I sketched out the painting to the best of my memory. This painting is that painting that I was painting in a dream. I want to do more of these. Just gotta figure out how to dream about painting and remember it. The base was pink of course. The color PINK is informing a lot of my work lately. think pink…

This work below is much smaller. Acrylic on paper. 24 x 12 inches. Thinking about warm colors and electric blue. Phthalocyanine blue mixed with white creates such a warm, powerful blue. Memories. Pieces and fragments of time connected together. A self-portrait on an ordinary day. Pipes. Sunset from a cold, autumn walk. A hand, twisted and contorted for the camera. A parking lot, empty except for one car outside of the frame. Moments bleeding together. Connected by random thoughts of bowls and hands and places.

Jacob Lawrence

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This is from a while ago, perhaps a year ago. But I did this project with my lower elementary students. We learned about Jacob Lawrence and his cityscapes, and then students drew a city with oil pastel. Then, they added black outlines on top with acrylic paint and extra colors with tempera paint. Everything was drawn on cardboard because toned paper adds an extra element of pizzazz. So here they are:

Some Sculptures with My Students

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For my Saturday art class this fall, I taught students how to create a lot of sculptures. We started out using clay and students designed sketches of what they wanted to create and then used clay techniques to put together their clay pieces (with air dry clay). They painted their sculptures with tempera. We also made plaster strip sculptures. Students created their base with balled up newspaper and tape and then went over the newspaper with plaster strips. My little kids made pumpkins/jack-o-lanterns and my older kids designed their own sculpture.

Fall Leaves

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This fall, lower elementary made these lovely fall leaves using chalk pastel and construction paper. Students practiced tracing leaf templates and adding colorful patterns with chalk pastels. Students even experimented with blending and smudging the pastels together.

Kindergarten also created fall leaves using a cool colored paper for the background and a warm colored paper for the leaf. Students also practiced tracing and cutting leaves. With kindergarten, I try to do as much cutting practice as possible so students can continue working on strengthening cutting skills.

Kindergarten Self-Portraits

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Teaching kindergarten about self-portraits is really fun because they come up with such creative ideas and their drawings of themselves are so happy. It’s been a very long and tiring week of teaching but seeing the art my students create always makes me happy and reminds me of the reason I love teaching art.

One kindergarten class drew self-portraits from head to shoulders. They added yarn for hair and buttons/sequins as decorations.

The other kindergarten class painted pictures and then drew a self-portrait of themselves as an artist, holding a paintbrush and painting the background.

Making Paper With My Students

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This fall, I taught a weekend art class at my local arts center. Since the classes were smaller, I really wanted to make paper with my students. It was a lot of prep work and my blender started smoking at one point, but it was really fun and a great way to introduce students to the paper-making process.

I prepped red, yellow, and blue paper pulp by blending soaked paper scraps and adding acrylic paint to the blender. The main paper pulp was in big tubs and students used smaller cups to scoop up paper pulp to take to their seats. Students created paper pulp designs on top of a piece of cardboard covered in plastic wrap.

Here is the process of making paper pulp designs:

The finished paper!:

Primary Colors & Color Mixing

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I taught this lesson with lower elementary a few weeks ago. We talked about primary colors and how they are super special colors because you can’t create them with any other colors. And primary colors can create a ton of new colors when mixed together.

To practice mixing colors, each table got red, yellow, blue, and white paint and students created and named as many colors as they wanted. I love how creatively students named their colors. Some of my favorite color names were “blainbow”, “stinckpot”, “peace” and “thunder”.

I even wore red, yellow, and blue to match my primary color lesson (and to achieve my goal of being like Ms. Frizzle). My hand was very messy at the end of the day which I love because a messy hand is the mark of an artist 🙂

Here is my lesson plan: