Altered Book Club

Below is a snippet of the 12 or so projects the Altered Book Club made in class and on their own. We took a vintage children's book and used it as an art journal and revamped the cover to reflect them. 

Jenni Horne style paintings of their choice and mandalas as unique as they are!

Color blocking and tree silhouettes.

Crazy colorful mixed media trees.

Mixed media self portrait on their covers.

Teesha Moore inspired collages.

Another color blocking + stencils to journal on whenever they wanted. 

Frida Kahlo self portraits

Pretty amazing things tend to happen when I face (ha! no pun intended) a fear with my art and my teaching. 

First off, I have always hated, capital H Hated, drawing people. Trees, houses or doodles, I'm your girl but drawing faces....I'd rather not. So, when I sucked it up and put Frida Kahlo on the list for Mimicking the Masters, I decided to take Christy Tomblinson's SheArt 3 workshop, which gave me a good idea of what I wanted to do and how to tackle face making. 

Here is what my brave little kids created! Amazing how fearless they are! I could learn a thing or two from them!

Klee Cityscapes

Geometry + architecture + modern art + killer color theory = Paul Klee 

We inititally drafted our design focusing on the shapes he used in his work, then transferred it to the canvas.

Working with one color at a time, trying to make it as boxy as possible and as always they made their own color choices. 

Coming together!

We used Faber Castell Gelatos to add the finishing touch.

Jennifer Moreman inspired Drippy Chevron

Pinterest and late night feedings allow me to stumble upon all kinds of amazing artists. Case in point: Jennifer Moreman. Check out her work here! It's fabulous! http://jennifermoreman.com

For the class called Messiness, we checked out her work and talked about how color choices affect the feel of a painting. For instance, choosing various shades of blues would give a painting a wintery feel and as we found out later turquoise, gold, black and baby blue give a ritzy beach resort feel (their words not mine).

Ever the believer in allowing kids to make their own choices in art, the girls chose color schemes before we started painting. You can see which colors she chose on the top side of her canvas.

And we painted zig zags....

And they let the paint run...

And we let them dry in the Oklahoma summer sun to dry super fast..

So proud of these girls! I love projects that turn out as unique as they are. No cookie cutter paint by numbers here!

Graffiti Stained Glass

Inspired by this amazing Banksy piece, our multi-layer, multi-messy, multi-extremely fun paintings did not allow documentation of the layers because the teachers hands as well as the students hands had paint on them the majority of the time! I can sum the 6-8 layers up by saying to give the kid a color and let them have fun! We did make a stencil for the window but other than that this lesson was total freedom!