Michel Keck inspired Dog Collages!!!!

This was the one I'd been looking forward to all summer!! The moment last Fall I laid eyes on Michel Keck's work on my tiny iPhone screen, I squealed with joy!

         How fun are these!?!

This lesson took some preparation. The kids' homework was to text me a picture of their family dog. After I received them all, My son and I spent a day at Kinko's editing & enlarging the pictures. His patience was greatly appreciated :)

To create our dog collages we first traced our furry friends. I've found that using a window is the best way to achieve this. 

Next we got to work with scissors & mod podge!

Here's how they turned out!

So proud!

You can check out more of Michel's work, click here to visit her website!

Sugar overload with Wayne Thiebaud cupcakes

I knew this lesson was going to be great because I have two girls in this group that are HUGE Cake Boss fans. Hopefully Buddy will approve of our sweet treats :)

We stared out by studying value with a simple drawing lesson then played with some green & white icing on gram crackers :) 

The painter Wayne Thiebaud is one of my favs because his work just makes your taste buds start salivating!

We looked at lots of his work but studied this one because of his use of color. 

 We noticed that he uses lots of pastels, (hence the reason for playing with the icing earlier)  I gave the kids a lot more freedom to play with color choices and make pastels than any previous group.

Here is how they did :)

Red velvet, yum!!

Now your taste buds are screaming, "Must have cupcake!!"

Preparing for Thiebaud/painting with my cousin

In preparation for the next lesson I spent an afternoon dissecting Wayne Thiebaud's cupcake paintings having been unable to find a decent cupcake tutorial using acrylic. My cousin was down for a visit also, so I let her have one of my extra canvases and let her paint whatever she liked.

Here is what's cousin came up with. 

Looks good hanging in her Hawaiian themed room :)

Here are my cupcakes! 

Added a few finishing touches a couple days later. Hope the kids paintings turn out "sweet" too! 

The kids will do 3 cupcakes on a 2ft x1ft stretches canvas but this is on a 9x12 canvas board, what I do all my examples on because I'm just a tad bit cheap :p

Traci Bautista Girlie Glam!

I knew the second day of my July class would be an all girl affair so I hunted high and low on Pinterest for a super girlie project.

Enter Traci Bautista. 

When I came across her blog creativityUNLEASHED, I knew we would do something in her style. I purchased her book Doodles Unleashed while on vacation earlier this Summer and doodled away on the beach to get the creative juicing pumping. 

Here is the book, I highly recommend it! Beautiful colors & examples that inspire!

I decided on her girlie glam portraits for our all girl class. 

The girls were ECSTATIC when I showed them what we would be doing. *Insert girlie squeals and giggles here* We used watered down block printing ink and fine tip paintbrushes to practice our doodles. 

To practice our doodles I would give them a prompt like a circle, then they would dress up their circles however they liked, for instance: adding petals, drawing lines through it, or adding spikes to the outside. I had the little ladies pass their journals to their neighbor after they finished a shape and we continued this until the journals made it back to their girl. This way they got draw from others ideas and wouldn't fear messing up.

Having already readied our background before doodling by wetting our canvas lightly and finger painting shades of pink & purple, we set to work! 

I didn't bring easels this day because I wanted the girls to take breaks, draw inspiration from each others doodles, and flip through her book for ideas. Not to worry about finishing quickly but to enjoy the process.

My cousin who just moved from Hawaii wanted to do a Hibiscus for her new bedroom. 

The ink didn't take long to dry, when it did they used their choice of soft pastel to color in the face.

 

Then, they added some paint.

And some more paint!

Finishing it off by hot glueing on some jewels to push it into ULTRA super girlie land, the portraits were complete :)

Next week, the token boy will be back so alas, the pinks, gems, and all things girlie will have to be put away. 

Traci even has online workshops (and in person workshops but they are in California....too far for this Okie)

Check them out here. I plan on doing one of the online classes around Christmas time as a little gift to myself :)

Shelli Walters inspired poppies

For the first day of the 10-12 year old group I chose to study one the single best reasons anybody should join Pinterest. Shelli Walters is a graphic designer in Oregon who happens to paint on the side and sell her masterpieces on Etsy, click Here to check out her work. Her paintings are gorgeous!

We talked about open & closed composition. 

Open composition is like a landscape painting or picture close up of a flower, where the entire object isn't on the canvas. Your mind has to visualize the rest. 

Closed composition is like painting of a vase with flowers or a picture of a bird flying. The focal point is the object and you can see all of it.

We examined Shelli's paintings and decided which were open composition and which were closed composition.

We applied open composition to the layout of our poppies & leaves we would paint. 

Painted their choice of color for their poppies, then using a variety of shades of greens for their leaves & stems. 

Next they used magazine clippings the same color as their flowers and mod podged them on as petals, much like Shelli uses in her works. 

Lastly, they painted a black circle in the flower and adding a hint of gold to make it sparkle if they liked.

Their finished products blew me away! 

This was my favorite lesson because the process in creating these is so fun and free. I loved it!