Just A Little Something

So, in order to feel productive without having to do too much I began painting these little porcelain bowls. They only cost about $1.50 at Pier 1 and the Pebeo Porcelaine paint is only $4 or $5 a container. So it's fun, cheap and creates a nice tangible piece in the end. Hypothetically it would be awesome to make tons more with other, more evolved designs and sell them. But for now, they'll just be my own personal project.

Snail Mail

Watercolor on Arches paper.

Some Sketchbook Pages

Both are crayon resists done with watercolor and some pencil.

Ever since I came home for the summer I haven't had a scanner and it makes recording my work a lot harder. These were done with a camera so they're a bit fuzzy but get the idea across.

More Projects With the Tatertots

Again I found myself with another time slot at camp where I could lead my own activity. The theme of the week was 'Super Heroes', so I tried to create a project that could encompass that idea while encouraging artistic principals. Plus, I once again only had an hour.

So we did comic books covers for the kids self-created super heroes.

First I had them start with an idea for a superhero. Most of them already had an idea in mind and if they didn't I found a nifty little (fairly PG) super hero name generator. Then they drew the superhero in pencil, allowing room somewhere on the page for the name to appear boldly. After their pencil sketch, I had them ink around the lines with a heavy Sharpie to get that classic strong black outline. The final step was adding blocks of flat color. In a perfect world we would have had far more time to sketch and could have maybe colored in gouache. But in the time frame we had we did it the color with marker and colored pencil.

Super Pug in progress.
Booger Man and The Nose in progress.

Working With the Tatertots

So the blog has been falling a little short lately as far as updates are concerned. But this is because I have been doing something just as valuable with my time. I have been focusing a little less on my art and a little more on teaching art to kids. I have been working at a camp called 'Dutchess Arts Camp' for the past few years, being a counselor for the 7 to 11 year old age range. Due to some scheduling shortages I ended up with a few extra blocks in the weeks to come up with my own project.

My challenge: Come up with a project that taught kids about some particular type or facet of art that related to the theme of the week and could be completed in about an hour.

The first week I had this opportunity the theme of the week was 'Art Around the World,' so I decided to teach the kids how to make very basic books that could be their "passports" for the week.
To make the books the kids designed back and front covers to their passports and then glued a very simple accordian structure of pages to the inside of each cover. I encouraged them to create emblems for the outside that reflected what art camp to them, though we definitely ended up with just a lot of American flags.
After the books were finished I took head shots of each camper in my group and printed them out nice and small like passport photos and them glue the pictures inside the cover.

As I final touch I handed out small pieces of paper cut like stamps and asked the kids to decorate the stamps with the activities we had done. There were Tye-Dye Day stamps, Theater stamps, Magic and Mime stamps, all of which we would glue into the passport as they completed them. This part they did during the extra time in their other classes, the "free draw" time. All the kids went to the extra effort of trying to fill up their books even though it was their time to do whatever they liked.

All in all: It was well suited for the age group (7 and 8 year olds) but it was impossible to pull of in an hour. I had to do most of the prep work for the kids and we had to make the all the extra pieces on our own free time. With an hour every day for a week this could have been one amazing project.