Tuesday, June 9, 2009

It's been waaaay too long!

I'm back! It's been far too long, I know. The good news is that I've wrapped up some big projects and time-consuming commitments and am ready to take some time for me - and some time for my poor neglected blog!

I look forward to getting you all up to speed on projects I've been working on, and projects that are coming up soon. I'm also going to be continuing to play around with the format of this blog. I'm much happier with a three column template - but as my mother noted (and mother's are *almost* always right - it feels a lot less intimate now... and I don't want that!)

So thank you for hanging in there with me while I've been gone, and for continuing to be patient as I play around with formatting. I appreciate all of your comments, e-mails, and visits so much!

I'm doing a lot of teaching this summer, and am very much looking forward to it. This afternoon I taught my first of a series of art projects based on picture books to a mixed age group of elementary students. Today's project was based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, and was based on a lesson from Art Projects for Kids.

Children drew eight lines of any length in the middle of their paper with a pencil, then joined the tops and bottoms of the lines to create a caterpillar body. They then added a head, tail and some feet.


Then they went over all of their pencil lines with a dark crayon...

Then they painted with watercolors, experimenting with using different amounts of water and paint to create lighter and dark shades. They were encouraged to leave no white space (some of them did this, some did not) and create a really colorful piece. We discussed the way that the crayon resisted the watercolor paints, and showed through even when painted over.




Here are some of the finished products...


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It's been awhile since I taught, so this was a bit of a brush up lesson for me. I wasn't thrilled with using palette watercolors - I much prefer liquid - but they are much more expensive. I would also prefer a heavier paper - so the next time we do watercolors I will splurge on some watercolor paper that can handle the moisture a little bit better.

Working in nonprofit you work with what you have - and this is what I had. I think the students did a nice job on this project, and I can't wait to work with them some more!

4 comments:

Craftpassion said...

Hi Joanne, your new layout looks awesome, I especially love your header, so brightly coloured, it cheers up my day :)
I am also just back from a long break concentrating on my new blog platform and layout, it is almost done and still need some tweaks going around. I can see from your blogroll, it is not capturing my latest update there, can you do a manual "following" at your blogger dashboard so that you will know when I updated my blog. This happened when I no longer use blogspot platform.
Thank you.

Joanne said...

Hi there! Nice to hear from you! I'll see what I can do!

Dot said...

this is such a cool idea.. i need to paint more with The Boy :)

Joanne said...

Thanks Dot - and thanks for the link as well!