Artsonia After School Art Club: Paint a Peacock with Me!

I spent some time this summer making more videos... but this time not for my awesome YouTube Channel... but for Artsonia's.

My first video was the one I sent in as the "audition" I guess... and you had to introduce yourself and it seemed weird.  I talk in weird voices and make faces all the time to a group of kids and never have to watch myself doing it.  The project is good though.  I wanted to teach a nice simple concept, and I wanted to make sure that I was catering to kids doing art at home.  It works. And I'm hilarious.  It's also the only one that has a cool soundtrack, because they told us not to add music to the rest ☹️




The videos get more and more embarrassing after this one! My daughters are looking into the witness protection program.  I can't wait till they publish more. 😶😃

Art Teacher Stickers!

I opened a Redbubble store and put some of my illustrations on stickers!

It's been very sad, because they send you emails that tell you to check out your dashboard, and then you go there and it says things like:

TeachersPayTeachers is way cooler.

Anyway. Check it out. I'm self-promoting.

Succulent Still Life Junior High Art Lesson

Basically - I bought a whole bunch of succulents last year and managed to kill most of them before we even had a chance to get to this lesson.

Kill succulents?  Yeah.  I don't know. Too much water?  Not enough sun?  Not enough water? Too much sun. No idea.

I wanted each eighth grader to have their own, then for our second project we would make a clay pot for the succulent - but they got too dead for that.

The succulents, not the eighth graders.

Here is the lesson directions and rubric.  Its on TPT, but it is free. I did not actually follow the directions that I had written out though.  I wrote the directions thinking we were going to be looking at photographs of succulents, and not have the actual succulents in front of us.  The directions we actually followed are in this video.  The rubric included is also a little generic, and I altered a few things after I taught this to my actual students.  But it gets the main points across.



One of the coolest things that did happen with this lesson was all of the students using their music stand lights from Uncle Jon's Music in beautiful downtown Westmont.  I highly recommend investing in a set for yourself. 

We made Mandalas! Slideshow, Instructions, & Video.

We made Mandalas in Fifth grade to reiterate some radial design/balance info and complex patterns and repetition.  I included a little of the art history/cultural information too.

This project also knocked out our diocesan assessment, AND was supposed to be a good warm up for our collaborative church auction project. An awesome gel glue batik quilt! But, the best laid plans... 

I started out with this slideshow discussing what we were going to be doing.   I took photos from the internet, and turned it into a slideshow teaching what I wanted to teach.  I DID cite my sources at the end though!

I knew the concept itself wasn't going to be confusing for them, but actually making the mandala would be a little more difficult. I wrote out instructions - and even as I was writing them, I kept getting confused. If I was getting confused, I knew my fifth graders would have no hope. So, I made this video. The idea is always to show it to them first, and then have it stop and go as we work on it together.

 

The video definitely helped, but what doesn't help is not having light boxes when you are trying to trace.  All and all we got through it!  Here is the entire Artsonia Gallery.

Once this project was in the books, I set forth to complete the mandala gel glue batiks I was hoping would come together into a neato quilt for our Class Auction Project for our church gala.  Well.  I only see these friends once a week for 40 minutes... on a Monday... and we ended up having two Monday snow days and I was even sick one of the Mondays too.  The quilt never made it to fruition, but the small batiks did!

We transferred our original mandala to the fabric with glue during one class (I had xerox copied them) and painted with acrylic the next 2 classes.  I then took them home and soaked them in hot water, and threw them in my washer's rinse cycle!  I was so done with mandala's, I didn't want to spend another week on radial design!! 

That would have been a pretty funky quilt!  Right? Anyway, my washer seems to still be working fine. While much of this was going on, we also had a circular weaving on a CD project that they mostly worked on independently.  

I swear, if this class does not know what radial design is after this trimester... I am going to lose it!

Shaded nutcrackers in time for Christmas! With Directions and a Rubric.

I finally got my nutcrackers in a project that I actually like!

Several years ago I came across the tutorial on Art Projects for Kids on drawing nutcrackers.  I varied the lesson each time I taught it, but was never happy with the results.  I would like the children to personalize their nutcrackers, but they would come out looking like mutant robots.  I started adding shading with oil pastels to the mix, then we had these nutcrackers with no background and a mystery light source... or worse, A CORNER SUN!

This is my daughter's.  It is a mutant robot dancer "nutcracker" floating in the abyss.

I passed out the directions to my fourth graders, as well as the nutcracker tutorial from above.  In the directions, I ask the students to follow the instructions on the tutorial, but before they start drawing too many details  I stop them.

I pass out the Nutcracker Brainstorm page next.  We talk about how the artists who designed these nutcrackers wanted them to all look unique.  Some had occupations, some were royalty, some had beautiful patterns and designs on them (the handout is 2 sided).  We talk about ways we can turn our nutcracker into a me-cracker.  Which - quite frankly - is hilarious, because the rest of the hour I have kids asking me if their project is a "me-cracker," and I respond with, "yeah, that's a you-cracker!"

When the you-crackers are drawn and traced, and colored with oil pastel, we actually DO draw a corner sun on the right side of our papers.  I make a huge deal about it and pretend like I am having a heart attack and my hair is falling out because of all the corner suns, but alas - for our art - I carry on! I tell them about the corner sun being the light source and how we are going to add shadow to the other side/left of our nutcrackers.

I demonstrate how to smear their oil pastels, and we talk about which parts, cracks, and crevices might have a shadow and which might not.

Once their is a shadow, there may be a glare. The nutcrackers are probably wood and lacquer so they might have a shiny spot!  We add that with our white.

Here is the genius part of this whole lesson.  I printed photographs of burning candles on 11 x 17" paper.  I just downloaded some stuff I found on the web, and printed on the Xerox machine in black and white.  Now, these are Christmassy, and the one is an advent wreath (I teach in a Catholic School 2 days).  I printed 6 of each and let the students choose which one they wanted.

Finally, students cut & paste, and we had our finished product.  I was so pleased to have finished looking nutcrackers for once!

Finally, students completed the Rubric for this project.  See the rest of the class at Artsonia.com