I got an Itch

I got in one of those moods today. I got fed up with looking at this monthly calendar I carry with me all the time. Some people have electronic gadgets, I have this:It does the job but it's B-U-T-T ugly. Today was the last day I was going to look at this. Did you ever do this as a kid?Take a brown paper bag and make a book cover with it?I pulled out a brown bag, fitted it on the planner and tried to figure out what to do with to the cover.Although I'd pulled out a pile of collage papers, I decided to paint the background.Then I went back to my pile of papers and trimmed and glued.The inside covers have a deep enough pocket to tuck papers in. I'll probably end up adding altered envelopes for another layer of pockets.
This is the result. Painterly, with some collaged elements and no more ugly planner. I may go back with a bit more stamped paint to bring together the papers with the background.

It was a full day of classes with Kinder in the morning and 5th grade for the rest of the day. I worked on the planner cover during breaks and at lunch. Teaching was interesting. I croaked my way through classes. My voice is pretty much gone.
I pulled from my Art Unraveled experience again and did Continuous line contour drawings with my students. We started out with drawing faces from their imaginations to give them the hang of the continuous line. Then we moved on to drawing objects. Some students were perplexed and others enjoyed themselves.
I was floored when I saw this drawing. This child has been a student of mine year after year. All those years I've seen project after project blown from not following directions.
Something must have clicked because she did an excellent job. Look at those curls! I'm sending this one home in a frame!

We ran out of cough medicine tonight. Hopefully, no one wakes up with a coughing fit tonight. Cough, cough!

Marissa

9 Weeks of work

I'm up later than I intended. I was actually already asleep but I got a phone call and I'm fully awake now. Before leaving school today I spent some time photographing some of my student's finished art projects. My 5th graders have worked on these monochromatic, abstract, self portraits for the last 9 weeks.

I wish I could frame them all before handing the projects back, they look great. We looked at the work of Pablo Picasso for inspiration. First by discussing his Rose and Blue Periods from his early work. Then by looking at examples of African masks which influenced his later work.
Each student had to create and abstracted self portrait, trace both their hands and add a patterned background. Overlapping and use of line to create mood were encouraged.
We spent a class period painting a value scale mixing tints and shades of one color/hue.
Each student chose the hue of their choice for their portrait. Having learned from teaching this lesson before, I had them start out by painting their largest shapes/areas with their hue. That gave them the opportunity to get used to working with tempera paint and handling the brushes.
In addition to the hue, they were required to mix a minimum of three tints and three shades. Thin and thick tipped black markers were used to outline all the shapes.

Some of the paintings are pretty expressive and just plain fun to look at. I'll share a few at a time in the next week.