A Cheery 2013 to You All

I don't consider myself to be superstitious  but I do love the number 13 and I'd like to think that it's my "lucky number". I've had a surprisingly number of happy events occur on Friday the 13ths and so I would looooove to hope that the year 2013 will be a wonderful year. For all of us. I suppose my ancestors from the old country would think that I was tempting fate by voicing this hope. So when I'm done blogging I'll go throw some salt over my shoulder and find some wood to knock.

A nice way to welcome in the New Year is some bright cheerful flowers. And nothing says cheery like flowers created by my 4-5year old class. Toss in some bright colors and recycled objects and you have the makings of some uplifting artwork.

 I had the young Artists select colored papers and create vases from card stock. I wanted them to draw the vases themselves and cut them out themselves. They often want me to cut items for them but, darn it, these are skilled Artists and they need to recognize that they can control those scissors!

I showed them paper with low-key colors: cut up paper, ripped up vintage maps (which have lovely pastel colors) and plain paper. I gave them scissors and paper punches to make shapes. Some chose the punches, others went to town cutting and ripping. They used these to collage their vases. Then they placed their vases against some high-key colored backgrounds. They chose bright red and blue. They painted cut up cardboard egg cartons in low key colors to match the vases and glued the vases and flowers down on the paper. Then they chose recycled objects to fill the flowers: buttons, shells, etc.

I explained that it would be nice to place their flower vases in space rather than have them float around and they all drew in a horizon line or table top. They were then able to "decorate" their tablecloths. Most chose to use marker although one Artist glued down buttons. Didn't they do a wonderful job?

A HAPPY AND PEACEFUL NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL! 

Now off I go to find some salt to throw and wood to knock on. 

This Is Not A Marker

My students love markers. Why? Beats me. I do like using an archival non-bleeding pen for my illustrations but as a child I was never a marker fanatic. Always preferred pencils, paint and collage, etc. Perhaps the marker selection wasn’t as abundant when I was a kid. Did we only get tiny packs of primary colors? I don’t remember. But I do know what a challenge it is to get some kids away from the markers. Some of my kids challenge me when I pull out any other material.

So my goal for my last single summer class before my upcoming Picasso’s Basement Camp in August was to come up marker project that I loved and thought they would enjoy.

Let ‘em go marker crazy!

I did a little thinking and, although I did alter it, in the end I have to credit one of my favorite art teacher blogs called There's a Dragon in my Art Room http://plbrown.blogspot.com/ for this lesson. She leaves this project for her substitute teachers because it is so easy to set up. But I fell in love with it for several reasons:  

1. It involves a lot of creativity. 
2. It encorporates recycling. I’m a recycling freak.
3. It requires very little prep work. Always a nice factor in the summer. 
4. It allows the kids to work with those darned markers.

First we read a wonderful picture book called Not A Box by Antoinette Portis. Simple plot: A rabbit is sitting in a box and is asked “why”. Because it’s NOT A BOX! It’s a ship. Why is he sitting on the box? Because it’s NOT A BOX! It’s a volcano! The book was for much younger children than those in my class that day, but I was surprised to find that they enjoyed predicting what the rabbit would do next with the box and were also quick to guess the moral: With some creativity and imagination you can make something into something else!

I dug through my collection of scratched and damaged CDs for this project, but also set out a pile of recycled soda bottle caps.  I kept a hot glue gun handy at a safe distance from the kids.

I pre-glued the CD’s on large sheets of heavy paper using the glue gun. The Picasso’s Basement Artists were told that they weren’t CDs and that their assignment was to surprise me by turning them into something else by drawing around them. With markers. (Imagine the delight of those marker-loving kids!) I gave them the option of adding bottle caps.

I also suggested that they could title their work.

Gentle readers, kindly remind me that in the future I should specify that they put the title and their names on the BACKS of the drawings. Luckily in this case the titles seemed to add to the wackiness of the artwork! Here’s a sampling of the pictures they came up with:

The Space Craft 

The Space Ship

The Eyeball

The Lady Bug