March 5 & 12

Somehow I missed typing up the blog last week so this week I will update both.

Last week was a quiet week since all the elementary artists were at the science fair, but we still had Art club to allow the junior high artists to get a little more caught up. However to be included in the weekly sketchbook challenge all sketchbooks needed to be handed in before Art club began. Here are this weeks winners for the potion bottle challenge:

Gryffindor's Winner

Memory Potion

Ravenclaw's Winner:

Sleeping Potion

And here is my example for the little artists. I made a mermaid potion. 

Next week's sketchbook assignment is to design an original monster. Think about all the pieces before you start to draw. Such as how many arms, eyes, legs. Or what your monster will be covered in, slime, scales, fur etc. Lastly you need to come up with a name for your monster as well.

For the rest of class we just worked on our current project painting on our cans. I hope that within a class or two that we can start wrapping up this project.

This week we started by learning how to draw a Minion from the Despicable Me movies.

All the minions drawn looked fabulous....I'm very impressed how they turned out.

This week's sketchbook assignment was very impressive. There was a lot of thought, effort and time put into all the monsters, which made it very hard to decide who the winner was.

Gryffindor's Winner (Abysslich)

Ravenclaw's Winner (Baby)

This week we have had 3 artists complete their cans and are ready to move on to the next project. So here it is:

Wire words wrapped in yarn

Wire words wrapped in fabric

We will be creating hashtags made out of wire and either fabric or yarn. If you are unfamiliar with hashtags they are a faster way to search for subjects on either Instagram or Twitter. Each artist will come up with an original hashtag that is either inspiring to them or artistic in theme. There is a catch, each hashtag must be a minimum of 4-6" tall. This will make it easier to see on the wall from a distance. 

Here is the start of my example:

My hashtag will say: #inspireothers

Next week (Thursday, March 19th) we will be welcoming a guest into our Art Club. So I'm not sure what all we will be doing this week but I can tell you that it's going to be amazing!!

Oh and this week's sketchbook assignment is to turn a letter of the alphabet into something that starts with that letter. I showed an example of "B is for Butterfly". Please do not write what it is on the page. The picture should tell us exactly what letter and item you chose. Get as creative as you can!

Feb 26

This week we started our warm up drawings with the "squiggle". Students enrolled in our last session loved the squiggle and requested that we do it again. So we squiggle on our papers for 10-30 seconds then try to find something in the squiggles. Our students found anything from a bunny rabbit to Winnie the Pooh. It's a great way to be creative and to "think outside the box". Which seems to be our class motto at times. After this we looked at our latest sketchbook assignments, being our Google "Doodles" as they are called. Google has employees (or Doodlers as they are called) create these doodles, but they do accept submissions of ideas. I will be submitting not only this weeks winner but also a few others I believe that Google may like. Here are some of them:

Ski themed

Monsters Under the Bed

Bird Paradise

St. Patrick's Day

Down the Drain

This week we named our 2 groups in our classroom. Our group names this session will be Harry Potter themed; Team Gryffindor & Team Ravenclaw. 

The rest of class was spent working on our current projects. Still waiting for 3 more Candy Collage pieces to come in, please finish those up ASAP. Once all are complete I will post a photo of the whole collage.

This week's sketchbook assignment is to design a "potion bottle". Please have a theme for your bottle. As an example: If you are making a love potion the bottle should be red and covered in hearts, or if you are making a death potion the bottle should be black covered in skulls. Be creative and show me what kind of potion you would love to have.

I know that next week will be quiet as some of the younger grades will be at the Science Fair but there will still be class to allow other kids to catch up a little more. If you would like to have your potion bottle in the weekly challenge please hand it in to me either Wednesday in the kindergarten room or Thursday after school as you are heading to the Science Fair. And good luck to all participants in the fair.

 I will let you know our new sketchbook assignment on Friday if you stop in to see me at lunch time. 

Feb 19th

This week our warm up included some basic drawing techniques I learned in college. We drew a live model in 30 second increments. We started with basic "get the sketch" on the page, then moved to using a pen (no erasing), and lastly we used our opposite hand (just to get the brain flowing).

Then went back to working on our projects. We still have a few working on the candy collage, and a few that have started to paint their pop cans. Some of us that are starting to get behind in the projects might end up skipping a project in order to keep up. Half of the little artists seem to be forging ahead and a few are falling behind. But I don't want you guys to rush a project just to get it done. If you miss a project that's ok. Just work on the ones that have meaning to you. Better to connect with a project than just  do it to get it done.

Our sketchbook assignment this week is to design a Google "doodle", or a Google search page. They change them quite often and each has a theme. So here are a few examples:

I look forward to seeing what themes you can come up with.

Just as a sneak peek: we will be naming our new groups this week. What do you think we should call them? Last semester the groups were Big Hero 6 & the Fab 5 (both Disney related).

February 12th

Our warm up drawings this week included drawing 2 well known licensed characters. I don't normally allow the use of licensed character but since we are working on painting licensed characters I thought continue with this theme.

Winnie the Pooh

Baymax (From Big Hero 6)

We then moved on to work on our second project, for those students that have completed their portion of the "Candy Collage". I announced to the kids that now that you have designed your character onto a pop can in your sketchbook......lets paint them next. This requires the kids to prep the can by sanding it and painting it white. They then need to design the other 3 sides to complete the full 360 around the can. This is where a good composition can help or hinder the project. Any changes to the design need to be done now before painting. 

Here is my sketchbook design as well as the start of my can. The character figurine is Captain America but it's number 41 where my design is actually number 67.

Captain America (#67)

Captain America (#41)

 Let the sketchbook competition begin....(the students have become very competitive over the bragging rights of winning each week, the candy doesn't even enter the competition anymore...lol)

This week's sketchbook assignments were won by Ashley with her Barf & Belch design from "How to Train Your Dragon", and Emily with her design of Cogsworth from Beauty & The Beast.

Now to get to this week's sketchbook assignment:

The challenge is to create items only using the word of the item. So start out with the basic outline of the item, then fill the whole space with the letters of the item. Then erase the lines between each letter so the word makes up the item. Here are some examples I showed on the board which are not allowed to be used in your sketchbook. So no guitars, wings, tiara, banana, donuts, or cell phones. Let's see how creative you can be! 

January 29

Our warm up drawing exercise this week was to learn how to draw eyes. Here is what we learned:

I pinned this picture onto our Pinterest board for Art Club. You can find the pin here:

Art Club Board - Drawing Eyes

We then continued to work on the candy collage. By the end of class 5 pieces of the collage are complete. By the look of the rest of the artists we should be able to wrap up our first group project by our next class.

Our sketchbook assignment this week is to design a well known character into a pop can. I know this sounds a little weird but just hang in there. Here is where the original idea came from:

Art Club Board - Re-purpose soda cans

But the different twist came from the kids. They keep asking if they can make projects with well known characters such as Mickey Mouse or Batman. So this project the kids got to pick their own character but it had to start out as a "Pop Figurine" from the funko.com website. Each student picked a character that had not been already chosen so there will not be any duplicates. This is an example of a "Pop figurine" as well as the character I will be designing:

Pop! Marvel: Captain America

Now to turn it into a pop can design. I look forward to seeing your creations. Oh and you can't draw outside the pop can lines.

Here is the Pop can outline that I gave to each of the students to trace into their sketchbooks:

I know we were missing a few students because of the basketball game, so please come to see me in the kindergarten room at lunch time on Monday as we do not have Art Club this week due to Teacher's Convention. This way I can give you the can outline and pick a character for you to draw. I have the list of characters that have already been chosen. See you all on February 12th.

Spring Art Club Begins

Our new session of Art Club began on Thursday, January 22. We are fully booked but only had 12/15 show up for our first class. I will try to talk to the missing 3 artists to make sure they will be joining us or I will be contacting the students on our waiting list. So if you were missing please come see me right away.

Our first class back we went over the basics of drawing faces and drawing the basic body . There is a formula to make sure that your proportions look natural. 

Your eyes are at the 1/2 line, the nose goes onto the 1/4 line, and the mouth touches the 1/8 line as a start.

Then the whole body has a similar method for proportioning. By using the "head" as a guide.

Most female bodies are 6-7 heads in height and aprox. 2 heads wide.

After our warm up sketches, we started our first project. We will need all 15 (myself being #16) to complete our project in order for it to look like the collage I'm hoping for. This is the inspiration for this project:

Each student was assigned their own type of candy to draw for our "Candy Collage". The ideas were to enlarge the logo/packaging to run off the page. Each student designed their 6X6 piece of paper and then drew their candy. Most of the artists were finished drawing by the end of the class. Our next class we will colour our designs just with pencil crayons, but we will try to make sure we have shadows, shading and highlights. 

As this is our first week back I did not assign a weekly sketchbook assignment, but have asked that all the students decorate the covers of their sketchbooks to make is look as unique as they are. If any artist would like to put the plastic cover over their covers, it is available at Dollaramma for $1. It can be found with the stationary department, and is called "Book Protector". If you would like me to put the cover on for you just bring the roll into class with you, and I will help. Other things you can use would be packing tape or you can leave it as is. It's up to the artists how they decorate their covers. They can draw on it, paste pics to it....etc. Just be as creative as you can be.

We also have a Pinterest board that will show where my ideas and project come from. If you are on Pinterest you are totally welcome to follow this board to see what we are up to weekly. I won't show anything that is coming up....only what we have done in the classroom. 

Here is the link: St. Mary Art Club Pintest Board

The Winter Art Show

The St. Mary Art Club presented The Winter Art Show on Thursday, January 15th. And we had a terrific turn out. Thank you to everyone that attended our event. Here are a few photos from our event:

Multi-Tecnique One Drawing

Oil Resists

Water Colour Koi and Turtles

 Graffiti Names & Sketchbooks 

 A closer look at our Sketchbooks

Paper Mache Masks

Rachel's Oil Painting

I'm sorry to say that I do not have any photos of our clay snowmen. And being a papparazzi that I am, this completely shocks me. If anyone happened to take any photos of them I would love for you to email them to me.

Our new session begins on Thursday, January 22 3:30-5pm. I have 10 returning artists and 5 new ones. Which means that not only is our class full but we have a few names on a waiting list.

I can't wait to see all my little artists that are ready to learn....