Miro family portraits & Dali clocks

I had planned on doing a Cezanne fruit painting for the last day of mimicking the masters BUT the crazy/abstract/pop -pretty much anything to do with modern art side of me wanted to take on some surrealism!

Enter Miro & Dali. Two surrealists who couldn't be more different in their art 

and in life. 

Seriously, who wears a mustache like that anyways? 

You've got to have some crazy art to back up a crazy look like that! 

Anyways, after checking both them out, talking about surrealism, we identified the types of shapes and lines throughout Miro's work and played with his style in their sketchbooks.

Then, I had the girls draw a shape for each member of their family and using that as their torso, build off of it with crazy line and shapes to represent the rest of there body using either India ink with a brush or a sharpie. Whichever they felt more comfortable using.

Next they added color with acrylic paint, paintmarkers or sharpies.  

Once it was dry they reoutlined in black sharpie.

This was probably the least step-by-step lesson I've EVER done, and the girls loved having so much freedom on it.

This would also be perfect for a lesson about shapes.
I would have LOVED to have done this when I taught shapes in public school.

Would have been adorable!

And here is the clock process:

You take an old vinyl record.

Turn the oven up to 220 f.

Pop that record in the oven for 5 minutes or so.

Once it starts to curl along the edges use pot holders to take it out.

Using pot holders (which i am not in this pic becuase this record was looong cool) bend the record on the edge of the counter. I pulled it on the bottom to give it an even more dramatic look of actually melting.

Here it is bent up. Ah, don't you just love vintage labels lol

Prime that baby with white spray paint.

Spray paint desired color. **My golden was not harmed in the making of this art.

Nor was the rest of the audiance in attendance around my house.....

Use a sharpie or paint pen to draw either numbers or Roman Numerals, also adding your arrows.
I let the girls use a gold or silver paint pen to go along the middle and edge of their clock.

You could let the kids do all these steps but for time purposes the girls only did the spray painting and beyond. I did a sample one in the oven so they could see it but I melted all the records earlier that day that we used.

Klimt- Tree of Life

Gustav Klimt on of my absolute favorite artists but one I was absolutely fearful of attempting because so few of his work is kid friendly. My little my group of 7-12 year old girls studied the Tree of Life, The Kiss and some of his fully clothed portraits all the while looking for patterns. 

To make our own Tree of Life they first used some shimmery fluid acrylic on the canvas to break up the whiteness. Once that dried we started from the base of the tree and worked our way up keeping in mind that a tree's branches are thinner as you go up.

For this, we used a combo of a few browns and matte fluid to make it easier to achieve the desired swirls.

Next we talked again about patterns or objects we'd seen: triangles, dots, birds, mushrooms, mushrooms with eyeballs, squares, blobs, flowers, a blanket, ect.

To spice things up you can have them work on each others for a minute to give some life to their neighbors painting and to gain inspiration for when they get back to their own. 

If a kid got stuck, I had them flip their canvas to get a different perspective, this helped them focus areas that needed attention.

In the end some added caterpillars, bird houses, butterflies and even checkerboard games to theirs! Hey if Klimt can get away with the craziness on his tree then so can we!

Van Gogh Sunflowers

I knew this lesson would take the entire two hours, if not more so I didn't even attempt picture taking. Check out Sleepyhead Designs Studio here for the tutorial on it. Her blog has yet to fail me! 

I am beyond proud of how these 7-12 year old girls did! All but one of the girls have taken several classes with me and I have loved watching them develop in their technique over the last year!

Here is my example I did. Usually don't post mine but I was so proud of it as well as theirs' that I had to throw it in :)

Degas Dancers

For the most part, when I introduce the project we will be doing, I hear things like this from the kids: 

"Cool! That looks fun!"

"Awesome!"

But every so often I pick a lesson that gets met with:

"Uhhh... that looks hard" 

"I don't know if I can do that, Mrs. Lesley" 

This was that lesson. 

I had done two Mimicking the Masters classes in the winter and really enjoyed introducing the kids to great artists and their work. So I decided to do another round with different artist. After introducing Edgar Degas all the girls in this group decided that he was in love with ballerinas lol

To practice our ballerinas I had several printouts of Degas' and other artists for them to choose from. We practiced sketching with charcoal.

Then they set to work on their canvases.

Background color of their choice and a little dry brush black on the sides to frame our ballerina.

Painting in white first was a brilliant idea that was from Bloom Print Project lesson on Degas. The white allowed the girls to get the shape of the ballerina down without fear because as long as the paint was wet, a baby wipe would take care of a misplaced arm or a funky head without disturbing the background color.

Next they added the black paint. 

Some asked to have hints of a complementary color or gold to make their prima ballerina shimmer a bit. 

While others wanted something feminine💄

I got this fabulous lesson from Bloom Print Project to see more fabulous lessons check out the website here!